In the Summer of 2015 a team of hackers attempted to take control of an unmanned military helicopter known as Little Bird. The helicopter, which is similar to the piloted version long-favored for US special operations missions, was stationed at a Boeing facility in Arizona. The hackers had a head start: At the time they began the operation, they already had access to one part of the drone's computer system. From there, all they needed to do was hack into Little Bird's onboard flight-control computer, and the drone was theirs. When the project started, a "Red Team" of hackers could have taken over the helicopter almost as easily as it could break into your home Wi-Fi. But in the intervening months, engineers from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had implemented a new kind of security mechanism--a software system that couldn't be commandeered.

In the summer of 2015 a team of hackers attempted to take control of an unmanned military helicopter known as Little Bird. The helicopter, which is similar to the piloted version long-favored for US special operations missions, was stationed at a Boeing facility in Arizona. The hackers had a head start: At the time they began the operation, they already had access to one part of the drone's computer system. From there, all they needed to do was hack into Little Bird's onboard flight-control computer, and the drone was theirs. When the project started, a "Red Team" of hackers could have taken over the helicopter almost as easily as it could break into your home Wi-Fi.