Drone Denial-of-Service Attack against Gatwick Airport

Someone is flying a drone over Gatwick Airport in order to disrupt service:

Chris Woodroofe, Gatwick’s chief operating officer, said on Thursday afternoon there had been another drone sighting which meant it was impossible to say when the airport would reopen. He told BBC News: “There are 110,000 passengers due to fly today, and the vast majority of those will see cancellations and disruption. We have had within the last hour another drone sighting so at this stage we are not open and I cannot tell you what time we will open. “It was on the airport, seen by the police and corroborated. So having seen that drone that close to the runway it was unsafe to reopen.”

The economics of this kind of thing isn’t in our favor. A drone is cheap. Closing an airport for a day is very expensive.

I don’t think we’re going to solve this by jammers, or GPS-enabled drones that won’t fly over restricted areas. I’ve seen some technologies that will safely disable drones in flight, but I’m not optimistic about those in the near term. The best defense is probably punitive penalties for anyone doing something like this — enough to discourage others.

There are a lot of similar security situations, in which the cost to attack is vastly cheaper than 1) the damage caused by the attack, and 2) the cost to defend. I have long believed that this sort of thing represents an existential threat to our society.

EDITED TO ADD (12/23): The airport has deployed some anti-drone technology and reopened.

EDITED TO ADD (1/2): Maybe there was never a drone.

Posted on December 21, 2018 at 6:24 AM • 119 Comments