Thomson Reuters
Airplane flies over a drone during the Polar Bear Plunge on Coney Island in the Brooklyn borough of New York
A subsidiary of aircraft-maker Boeing, which specializes in unmanned aerial vehicles, is apparently working on a drone capable of delivering spyware to unsuspecting devices below.
The project involves Insitu, a Boeing-owned company that specializes in drones, and Hacking Team, the Italian firm that develops surveillance technology.
Hacking Team was recently hacked itself, which is apparently how the details of the Boeing project came to light.
The blueprint for this aerial spyware project says excitedly: "develop a way to infect computers via drone. One engineer is assigned the task of developing a mini infection device, which could be 'ruggedized' and 'transportable by drone (!)'", T3 translated.
If these plans were successfully carried out, drones would also be able to fetch spyware-carrying devices, latch onto Wi-Fi networks and release surveillance codes into a device of a suspect sipping on an espresso at Starbucks.
These plans were in the early budding stages, and there is no clear customer yet.
By foraging other Hacking Team information that was released in WikiLeaks, researchers and journalists recently also discovered a plan that involves spyware dressed up as an Android app bypassing Google Play's app restrictions.