There’s a reason consumer drones have evolved from an expensive toy into a tool of war: They can perform high-altitude surveillance, carry out reconnaissance, or even deploy weapons, with their operator safely hidden as far as miles away. By analyzing the firmware of a DJI drone and its radio communications, they’ve reverse engineered DroneID and built a tool that can receive DroneID transmissions with an Ettus software-defined radio or even the much cheaper HackRF radio, which sells for just a few hundred dollars compared to over $1,000 for most Ettus devices. ”Regardless of DJI’s motives in including drone pilots’ location in the data their drones continually transmit, the fact that this location data can be intercepted—not just with DJI’s Aeroscope devices but by any knowledgeable hacker—will have a significant impact on how the world’s most common quadcopter drones are used in war zones and other adversarial settings, says August Cole, a futurist and fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council