As reported by Gismodo: It's incredibly noisy in the cockpit of a helicopter, and you'd assume the
sounds you hear in any YouTube police chase video were just the deafening whine of
the chopper's engine. But as one hacker discovered, that monotonous drone can actually hide
some useful data, like the helicopter's GPS coordinates.
Watching cockpit footage of a police helicopter chase in Kansas City, Oona
Räisänen noticed some odd interference in the audio. She assumed it was just
being caused by the aircraft's engine, but after isolating and filtering the
audio she discovered it was actually a digital signal.
And it wasn't just
some random digital signal, either. It turns out the equipment used to transmit
the live video feed to the ground also passes along the helicopter's GPS
coordinates. And in a manner that anyone with access to the footage—like say the
millions of people using YouTube every minute—and a little know-how can actually
decode that data.
So does this pose
any kind of security threat? Not necessarily. The route a police helicopter
takes during a pursuit isn't exactly a secret. Anyone on the ground can monitor
its course, and this 'hack' was done well after the chase was over. It might
encourage law enforcement agencies to strip the audio before a video like this
is released to the public. But this hack is more of a "how interesting"
discovery than anything.
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