Anatomy of unmanned aerial vehicle hijacking with signal spoofing

An important aspect about unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV, drone) hijacking to emphasize is being highly targeted cyber attack in terms of cyber warfare terminology that covers exploitation, offense, defence and asymmetrical war power as a whole. An attempt of hijacking is a combination of cyber and electronic operations/efforts rather than a single click takeover as it requires several tools and different techniques from cyber and electronic warfare domains simultaneously in a series of actions to achieve its objective particularly when the target is a military vehicle. Multi-stage nature of modern cyber attacks based on the coordination of individual offensive actions encompasses a fully executed UAV capturing assault. GPS spoofing is in the center of these scenarios and an obvious threat against civilian signals but also must be seriously handled in military domain too. Anatomical analysis of UAV hijacking attack delivers insights about vulnerabilities, methods to exploit, mechanisms to detect, how to deter the attack and evaluates the impacts.