Tech
SHIELD activated: Researchers build defense to protect drones from cyberattacks
Fooled into following a hacker’s rogue commands, a drone is liable to do any number of things. Fly erratically. Speed up. Slow down. Hang suspended in the air. Reverse course. Take a new course. And, most dangerously: Crash.
What the compromised drone cannot do, however, is regain control. Lost to its original assignment—whether it’s delivering a package, inspecting an aging bridge or monitoring the health of crops—the machine is essentially useless.
At FIU, cybersecurity researchers have developed a series of countermeasures to fight back mid-flight against hostile takeovers.
Because drones are essentially flying computers, they are subject to the same software and hardware exploitation as their land-bound counterparts. But current drone-defense techniques fail to monitor all possible vulnerabilities.
FIU’s technology, called SHIELD, is different. Keeping watch over the entire control system, it picks up on subtle cues of malicious activity. It then identifies the kind of attack—even the stealthiest ones that often slip under the radar—before launching an attack-specific recovery process. The findings were presented at the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks.
“Without robust recovery mechanisms, a drone cannot complete its mission under attacks, because even if it is possible to detect the attacks, the mission often gets terminated as a fail-safe move,” said Mohammad Ashiqur Rahman, lead researcher and associate professor in FIU’s Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences.
“What’s important about our framework is that it helps the system recover, so the mission can be completed.”
Safeguarding the security of drones may soon become more important than ever before. This summer, the Federal Aviation Administration proposed expanding commercial drone use across industries. From Amazon deliveries to agriculture, the FAA expects more businesses to deploy unmanned aircraft, raising questions about safety in the face of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
Traditionally, attack detection has revolved around sensors that help the drone perceive its surroundings and fly safely. But these sensors can be easily manipulated. For example, in “GPS spoofing,” hackers transmit fake coordinates to trick the drone into taking a different trajectory.
Sophisticated cyberattacks, though, bypass the sensors and go straight for the control or actuation system, sneaking malware into the drone’s hardware.
“This is why a detection and recovery system that only takes into account the sensors misses the bigger picture,” says Muneeba Asif, Ph.D. candidate in Rahman’s research group and study author. “It will be blind to other attacks that happen across the system and at different levels.”
SHIELD goes further by monitoring the drone’s entire control system. It detects abnormalities not just in sensors but also in the hardware. For example, the battery and computer components reveal a lot. Sudden surges in battery power or overworked processors are strong indicators that an attack is in progress.
The research team, which also includes FIU students Jean Tonday Rodriguez and Mohammad Kumail Kazmi, compares their approach to how a doctor arrives at a final diagnosis. A symptom (in this case, sensor data) doesn’t always reveal the underlying cause of an illness. Physical evidence (what’s happening with the battery), though, can provide a better idea of what’s going on.
And, just as every diagnosis dictates a different treatment, the researchers also find each attack needed a more tailored recovery plan.
Through multiple hardware-in-the-loop simulations in the lab, researchers learned that every attack leaves behind a unique signature and impacts the drone‘s system differently. So, the team trained AI machine learning models to spot abnormalities in the data, use the data to classify the attack and roll out the prescribed recovery protocol. In the lab, all of this happened in less than a second. Average detection time was 0.21 seconds, and recovery 0.36 seconds.
Next, Rahman’s research group will scale up testing, preparing SHIELD for real-world deployment.
With drones poised to reshape commerce, infrastructure monitoring, disaster response and more, FIU researchers say securing them is no longer optional.
“Reliable and secure drones are the key to unlocking future advancements,” Rahman said. “It’s our hope this work can play a role in moving the industry forward.”
More information:
Muneeba Asif et al, “I will always be by your side”: A Side-Channel Aided PWM-based Holistic Attack Recovery for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, 2025 55th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) (2025). DOI: 10.1109/dsn64029.2025.00070
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Tech
Save 50% at Total Wireless, Even Without a Promo Code
Total Wireless, formerly known as Total by Verizon, is a prepaid, no-contract wireless provider with unlimited data covered by the Verizon 5G network. Total Wireless Total 5G Unlimited plan has unlimited data, talk, and text, along with a five-year price guarantee—meaning it won’t get jacked up after a trial period, guaranteeing you get unlimited data at a low price. Total Wireless has also introduced unlimited data on Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network that promises to be up to 10 times faster than the median download speeds of other providers.
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Tech
OpenAI Is Asking Contractors to Upload Work From Past Jobs to Evaluate the Performance of AI Agents
OpenAI is asking third-party contractors to upload real assignments and tasks from their current or previous workplaces so that it can use the data to evaluate the performance of its next-generation AI models, according to records from OpenAI and the training data company Handshake AI obtained by WIRED.
The project appears to be part of OpenAI’s efforts to establish a human baseline for different tasks that can then be compared with AI models. In September, the company launched a new evaluation process to measure the performance of its AI models against human professionals across a variety of industries. OpenAI says this is a key indicator of its progress towards achieving AGI, or an AI system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable tasks.
“We’ve hired folks across occupations to help collect real-world tasks modeled off those you’ve done in your full-time jobs, so we can measure how well AI models perform on those tasks,” reads one confidential document from OpenAI. “Take existing pieces of long-term or complex work (hours or days+) that you’ve done in your occupation and turn each into a task.”
OpenAI is asking contractors to describe tasks they’ve done in their current job or in the past and to upload real examples of work they did, according to an OpenAI presentation about the project viewed by WIRED. Each of the examples should be “a concrete output (not a summary of the file, but the actual file), e.g., Word doc, PDF, Powerpoint, Excel, image, repo,” the presentation notes. OpenAI says people can also share fabricated work examples created to demonstrate how they would realistically respond in specific scenarios.
OpenAI and Handshake AI declined to comment.
Real-world tasks have two components, according to the OpenAI presentation. There’s the task request (what a person’s manager or colleague told them to do) and the task deliverable (the actual work they produced in response to that request). The company emphasizes multiple times in instructions that the examples contractors share should reflect “real, on-the-job work” that the person has “actually done.”
One example in the OpenAI presentation outlines a task from a “Senior Lifestyle Manager at a luxury concierge company for ultra-high-net-worth individuals.” The goal is to “Prepare a short, 2-page PDF draft of a 7-day yacht trip overview to the Bahamas for a family who will be traveling there for the first time.” It includes additional details regarding the family’s interests and what the itinerary should look like. The “experienced human deliverable” then shows what the contractor in this case would upload: a real Bahamas itinerary created for a client.
OpenAI instructs the contractors to delete corporate intellectual property and personally identifiable information from the work files they upload. Under a section labeled “Important reminders,” OpenAI tells the workers to “Remove or anonymize any: personal information, proprietary or confidential data, material nonpublic information (e.g., internal strategy, unreleased product details).”
One of the files viewed by WIRED document mentions an ChatGPT tool called “Superstar Scrubbing” that provides advice on how to delete confidential information.
Evan Brown, an intellectual property lawyer with Neal & McDevitt, tells WIRED that AI labs that receive confidential information from contractors at this scale could be subject to trade secret misappropriation claims. Contractors who offer documents from their previous workplaces to an AI company, even scrubbed, could be at risk of violating their previous employers’ non-disclosure agreements, or exposing trade secrets.
“The AI lab is putting a lot of trust in its contractors to decide what is and isn’t confidential,” says Brown. “If they do let something slip through, are the AI labs really taking the time to determine what is and isn’t a trade secret? It seems to me that the AI lab is putting itself at great risk.”
Tech
The Samsung Galaxy Watch Is Discounted on Amazon
While iOS users have an easy smartwatch choice in the Apple Watch, Android owners have a few more options, as well as face shapes, to choose from. The semi-squircular Samsung Galaxy Watch8 and Watch 8 Classic have both a unique look and set of health features, and are currently marked down to as low as $280 at Amazon for the 30mm Bluetooth version, or as low as $433 for the Watch8 Classic.
As the first watches to sport Google’s Wear OS 6, these made waves when they released with bigger, bolder watch faces, and an improved interface that shows more information. It has a 1.5-inch AMOLED screen that’s generously sized even on the 40mm version we tested, and has more than enough brightness to check on a sunny day.
Both watches feature the kind of physical activity and health tracking data you’d expect from a modern smartwatch, including steps, heart rate, and both sleep quality and bedtime guidance, which recommends when you should go to bed, if you couldn’t sort that out on your own. You can also use the optical sensor to measure your Antioxidant Index to help track what you’re eating without manually logging meals.
Battery life is a key factor for any smartwatch, and the smaller 40mm didn’t quite impress us, running for just right around 20 hours, about half of Samsung’s claimed runtime. The more expensive Watch8 Classic lasted closer to two full days, even some tracked physical activities tossed in. If more than full day of battery is a key selling point, I’d consider making the upgrade.
While only the graphite and silver models are in stock as I write this, there are discounts for both the 40mm and 44mm sizes across both the Bluetooth only and LTE connected options. You can also scoop a healthy markdown on the more deluxe Watch8 Classic, which I spotted for $433 in black or $450 in white. If you’re curious to learn more, make sure to check out our full review of both the Watch8 and Watch8 Classic for all the details, or peruse our other favorite smartwatches to find your new daily driver.
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