British company Periphery is providing specialized protection for Ukrainian drones facing increasing cyber threats, Forbes reports.

“Malware can take a drone down,” technology correspondent David Hambling writes, highlighting the critical nature of these emerging threats in the Ukrainian conflict.

The company’s defense system centers on advanced monitoring software that can detect malicious activity within drone systems.

“Our technology uses our proprietary machine learning models to detect suspicious or confirmed malicious activity happening within a device,” said Toby Wilmington, co-founder and CEO of Periphery.

The protection software identifies anomalies in drone behavior and compares activity with known “normal behavior.” These anomalies may simply reflect changes in the system, such as a new payload added to the drone, but they may also reveal the presence of malware, which could cause a drone to behave unexpectedly or crash.

However, the threats extend beyond individual drones.

“In some cases, the risk is to the drone itself, but it may also be a way of delivering something malicious to a network that it may be later plugged into,” Wilmington said. “This creates the possibility of infection across multiple systems.”

How drones are exposed to cyber threats

The Forbes report highlights that Russian forces have been actively “flashing” thousands of DJI drones with new firmware every month, downloading complex updates from central servers. In February 2024, the Ukrainian hacker group IT Army of Ukraine claimed to have broken into these servers, causing “a significant malfunction” in the Russian drone update process.

Hambling notes that while this attack only temporarily slowed Russia’s ability to update its drones, a similar method could potentially implant malware into the drones themselves, with potentially “catastrophic results for 200,000 Russian DJI quadcopters.”

The report details several ways malware can infiltrate drones: it may be embedded during manufacturing, especially through compromised components; it could be introduced through firmware updates; or it might be installed if a drone is captured.

Wilmington notes that if a drone is captured, Periphery’s software can ensure no vital information is compromised. While theoretically, such software could be loaded with malware to infect enemy systems, Periphery’s activities are currently “purely defensive.”

This specialized protection is critical, as combat drone firmware is constantly updated. Hambling points out that Firmware 1001, which enables DJI quadcopters to operate in war conditions, has undergone over 40 versions in just two years, with each update potentially introducing new vulnerabilities.

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