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Low-Cost Drone Add-Ons From China Let Anyone With a Credit Card Turn Toys Into Weapons of War


Chinese ecommerce giants like Temu and AliExpress sell drone accessories like those used by soldiers in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

In December the Kyiv Post reported of the Ukrainian military's own long-range, tethered drones, that, “currently about 40 percent of the components [are] sourced locally in Ukraine while, because there is limited domestic microelectronics manufacturing capability, the rest are imported, primarily from China.” “I don't know a hobbyist that wants to fly a drone miles away with a tether to drop a water bottle in someone's yard,” says Dave Torres, Red Balloon's head of FPGA security. Red Balloon specializes in embedded device hardware and firmware analysis, so the researchers were interested to evaluate the processors and low-level code powering the fiber optic tethers and AI guidance components.

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