A security researcher confessed to the FBI that he hacked into an aircraft engine with his laptop.
Chris Roberts admitted hijacking a plane duringa flight in February, taking control of the entertainment system and causing the aircraft to fly sideways.
According to a search warrant application created by FBIin April, as published by Wired last Friday, Roberts stated that he took control of one of the plane , which led to the plane's lateral movement during these flights.
Asked last month when he was being escorted off a United Airlines flight, he posted a tweet that half-jokingly implied that he could control the crew's warning system and make passengers' masks fall off.
After that, his computers were seized by the FBI.
According to the application, Roberts said in an interview in February and March that he had hacked into the in-flight entertainment system on 15 to 20 flights over a four-year period from 2011 to 2014. Each time he was given the opportunity to open the cover of the electronics box located under the passenger seats and plug in an Ethernet, he checked the system for security holes and monitored communications from the cockpit.
"We found that the electronics box under Roberts' seat showed signs of tampering," Hurley wrote in the document.
Roberts was removed from the flight the same day. Along with it, a report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) was published, warning that hackers could even bring down an aircraft by using the Wi-Fi during flight. In a report published in the Sunday Morning Herald, Ken Westin, a security analyst at Tripwire, said: “Connecting your laptop to an in-flight system on a real plane with people is not how you conduct security research. Writing “joking” tweets about it is even more immature and irresponsible.”
