Breaking Drone Defenses: Using Chicken Wire to Defeat Net Projectile-Based Products

Blog post on Drone security defense measures showing a drone caught into chicken wire and stuck to the ground.

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The majority of practical drone defense products/solutions currently available use a net projectile of some kind.  These nets are typically very light weight, and wouldn't be heavy enough to drag down their intended targets.  Instead, they are designed to get tangled in the propellers of the 'rogue drone' being targeted in order to disable it (or make it crash).

Drone Defenses - Net Projectile Types for drone shooting
Drone Defenses - Net Projectile Types 

We successfully demonstrated how to beat most drone defense products that rely on such a net projectile, simply by building a protective bubble around our drones (using only about $16 of chicken wire and a few zip ties).

Drone Cage - Chicken Wire Bubble vs. Net Gun - 25July2017
 
Drone Cage - Chicken Wire Bubble vs. Net Gun (thenetgunstore.com) - 25July2017

 

However, we did identify one net projectile-based drone defensive product that did end up beating our chicken wire protective bubble -- namely the 12 gauge shotgun anti-drone net shells by SKYNET. These effective, yet extremely dangerous drone defense projectiles basically blew a shotgun hole in our cage.

SKYNET 12 Gauge Anti-Drone Net Shells - Shotgun Holes in our Chicken Wire Cage

SKYNET 12 Gauge Anti-Drone Net Shells - Shotgun Holes in our Chicken Wire Cage

While they do work, the dangerous nature of shooting even small metal pieces out of a shotgun does end up limiting significantly the practicality of when/where you can use the product in real life.

For updates and more drone security related info, see our main project page at:

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Francis brown

About the author, Francis Brown

Co-Founder and Board Member

Francis Brown, CISA, CISSP, MCSE, is the Co-founder and Board Member of Bishop Fox. Before founding Bishop Fox, Francis served as an IT Security Specialist with the Global Risk Assessment team of Honeywell International where he performed network and application penetration testing, product security evaluations, incident response, and risk assessments of critical infrastructure. Prior to that, Francis was a consultant with the Ernst & Young Advanced Security Centers and conducted network, application, wireless, and remote access penetration tests for Fortune 500 clients.

Francis has presented his research at leading conferences such as Black Hat USA, DEF CON, RSA, InfoSec World, ToorCon, and HackCon and has been cited in numerous industry and academic publications. Francis holds a Bachelor of Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania with a major in Computer Science and Engineering and a minor in Psychology. While at Penn, Francis taught operating system implementation, C programming, and participated in DARPA-funded research into advanced intrusion prevention system techniques.

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