Security at 20,000 Feet
“It is time to take a hard look at the drone security vertical to protect and safeguard your ‘friendly’ skies.”
- By Ralph C. Jensen
- Feb 01, 2020
For the sake of argument, let’s
say you have a massive facility
in a remote location that
needs security. This kind of
scenario is a very real possibility.
As an owner/operator you would
be looking for the best security available,
including a layered perimeter solution.
You find an integrator who begins with
the best products available, each able to
communicate in an open platform. You
are now secure.
Wait, Not So Fast
You might have overlooked that area directly
overhead, the area that leads directly
to your facility. It is more vulnerable than
you might think. It is time to take a hard
look at the drone security vertical to protect
and safeguard your “friendly” skies.
“In the United States, drones have really
taken off–from the enthusiasts who
use them recreationally, to businesses that
want to deploy them for package delivery,”
said Dave Preece, chief data officer
and vice president of marketing at Fortem
Technologies. “In situations where medical
and emergency services get bottlenecked
on congested roads or when there are no
roads, drones are the perfect solution.”
However, rules and regulations on
these unmanned aerial vehicles and skyway
highways are vague, and the number
of aircrafts in the air make airspace extremely
congested. Worldwide, there are
more than 44,000 airplanes flying every
day. Adding millions of drones to that
number and you begin to understand the
definition of overcrowded.
Drones are a bit unnerving by look
and sound. Yes, they are as noisy as an
airport. At a recent urban air mobility
and airspace security session by the Utah
Department of Transportation, Preece
said the conversation grew intense as they
discussed who exactly owned the airspace
where drones might fly.
The fight for authority over this space ranges from private citizens monitoring
around their homes, to cities, to state officials,
even the FAA. The true owner hasn’t
been clearly defined. Who, for example,
controls the airspace above private property
where privacy, safety and noise are a
huge concern? One thing is certain, drones
and those who engineer them mean business.
Security business.
Friend or Foe
Not every drone is a friendly drone, and
recent events show that bad actors can
use these unmanned aircraft to do mass
amounts of damage. Enter Fortem Technologies,
a company in the business of
rogue drone hunting. Their air security
and defense platform and fleet of malicious
drone interceptors has the ability
to intercept and down a rogue drone within
seconds.
During a routine test flight, Fortem
blue team members set up a virtual fence/
no fly zone to defend a multi-million
dollar moored yacht. A rogue attack
drone was launched by the red team to
fly around and attack the protected area.
Once an incursion into that defined space
was determined as a threat, the Fortem
DroneHunter launched autonomously to
pursue and track the rogue drone, streaming
information from its airborne radar
and optics into the SkyDome ground control
screen. The controller on the ground
watched the SkyDome monitor as the
rogue drone circled the target. Suddenly,
the attack drone moved in a little too close
and the defender, DroneHunter, created
by Fortem, launched into attack mode autonomously.
It didn’t attack all at once. Imagine the
attack drone is like a football player who
is the running back with the ball. The
defender drone, DroneHunter, is similar
to the middle linebacker who is patiently
waiting for the ball carrier to commit to a
(wrong) direction. All this is happening at
400 feet in the air.
With the rogue attack drone advancing
across the virtual no-fly zone, the Drone-
Hunter, programmed to defend the no-fly
zone, takes immediate action and closes in
on the rogue drone, tightening the distance
between them autonomously and flying
in lockstep with the attack drone’s every
move with fighter jet precision.
The DroneHunter closes in, and when
it gets within 20 feet of the attack drone
(depending on wind speed, altitude and
other factors), fires a 5x5 meter net at a
1000 psi and over 80mph strangling and
neutralizing the unwanted drone. The defender
drone then carries its prey back to a
predetermined location, away from population,
to be examined.
One last thing about drone capture.
The netting that is fired at the rogue drone
is relatively lightweight. You have to wonder
how it is fired from the defender drone
while remaining intact and able to hit the
target precisely. The customizable undercarriage
carries at least two nets, and can
be configured for more or different types
of effectors such as munitions and directed
energy, depending on the situation and
legal use. At each corner point of the netting,
a “bullet” ensures the net stays open
and focused on the malicious aircraft. The
company is always testing for various scenarios
and effectors with their blue/red
teams, and has over 3,650 captures.
A five-foot predator drone hunter is
able to carry up to a 30 pound load, and
when captured, can easily drop it to a preassigned
location. So, how much damage
might a drone be able to inflict? On Aug. 4,
2018, two drones detonated explosives near
Avenida Bolívar, Caracas, where Nicolás
Maduro, the President of Venezuela, was
addressing the Bolivarian National Guard
in front of the Centro Simón Bolívar Towers
and Palacio de Justicia de Caracas. The
attack was an unsuccessful assassination
attempt, as the payload of C4 explosives
detonated early. It does, however, give an
indication of how deadly a drone attack
would be if executed to precision.
The Other Issues
There are other issues to be considered
that are quite unnerving. Enthusiast
drones are flown on a radio frequency
(RF), and there are many RF-based counter
drone systems that detect, identify,
and even understand where the operator
is. Some of these systems can jam the RF,
rendering the aircraft useless and unable
to reach their intended target(s).
“RF counter drone systems have a lot
of limitations when rogue drones are programmed
to fly RF-silent which is easy
to achieve,” Preece said. “The Fortem
SkyDome, TrueView and DroneHunter
platform is radar based with lightweight
ground and airborne radar designed and
networked to see all ground or airborne
objects, so it can’t be spoofed or blindsided
by malicious drone operators. RF data is a great compliment to an airspace security
and defense system - when RF is available
to detect - but it is not foundational.”
According to Preece, Fortem has red
and blue teams (many staffed by eager
interns) that practice flying and detecting
RF-silent drone missions every day so
Fortem can stay ahead of this RF-silent
threat. Configuring a waypoint driven RFSilent
drone flight is not complicated and
can be configured by anyone who owns a
drone and has access to the internet.
“There is a mistaken belief that it
takes a Ph.D. to configure a drone to fly
RF-silent. To the contrary, it is as simple
as watching a short YouTube video,” according
to Adam Robertson the CTO of
Fortem. ”The technology that the Fortem
scientist and engineering teams are working
on are world class and leading edge.
We are making the airspace secure and
safe so that drones can be trusted as useful
tools to advance our civilization.”
If you are interested in what a drone attack
might look like, take a look at an August
2019 movie, An Angel Has Fallen. The
plot line is all about drones and the possibility
of an attack. Preece said the theme
of this movie is real, and it could happen
again. Nicolás Maduro, the President of
Venezuela, would tell you the same thing.
Also real is the robust deployment of
the 5G network. Because of its nature, the
use of the 5G network to fly a drone will
make it extremely difficult to isolate, take
over, and jam rogue drones.
Here is another example of how a drone
could cause chaos: American football is a
huge spectator sport in the United States,
and football (soccer) is huge in many other
countries. Stadiums are filled with cheering
fans. Most stadiums are open and vulnerable
to a drone attack. Even stadiums
that have a roof also have an opening and
are generally left open during a sporting
event. Case in point: In November 2017,
a man deployed a personal drone and
dropped leaflets over Levi Stadium during
a San Francisco 49ers vs. Oakland Raiders
football game. While the man was charged
with violating secure airspace, it was an
eye opener that a drone incursion was easily
made.
Cathy Lanier, the NFL senior vice
president for security told a Senate Homeland
Security and Governmental Affairs
committee, “IN the two years that I have
been at the NFL, we have observed a dramatic
increase in the number of threats,
incidents and incursions by drones.
“We are very fortunate that the drone
over Levi Stadium dropped only leaflets,”
Lanier said.
Unfortunately, there are those who
would plan and coordinate such an attack.
We’ve seen evil before and here is where a
defender drone comes into play. A squadron
of defenders would be placed around
the perimeter of the stadium, ready to be
launched on a moment’s notice, but how
do they know an attack is imminent?
It is rather simple. Fortem’s SkyDome
network is deployed around the stadium
and will pick up an aerial object and relay
that information to stadium command
and control security center. The radar and
AI-enabled software that enables detection,
tracking, pursuit, observation, threat
assessments and capture of the flying
drones cannot be compromised, and adds
a desperately needed security layer to the
stadiums multi-layered security. The system
works autonomously defending the
stadiums airspace night and day and in
good weather and bad, alerting security
personnel on their mobile device when
there is a potential threat.
Spying on the
Corporate World
Drones are also used for corporate spying.
Recently, an executive team holding
a meeting on a higher floor of an office
building witnessed a drone outside the
window capturing information on the
whiteboard presentation. The SkyDome
network would have alerted security staff
that an aircraft was in that immediate area.
Properly deployed, the air space
around a facility can be just as secure as
the ground perimeter.
“Fortem Technologies is engineering
solutions to make the airspace around us
secure and safe, so that the huge potential
and upside of drones can be realized,” Preece
said. “Collectively we have figured how
to make ground transportation secure and
safe, and we can do it in the air as well.”
This article originally appeared in the January / February 2020 issue of Security Today.