A year on from the Gatwick Airport drone incident, Amit Samani, Regional Sales Manager for Dedrone, explains how counter-drone thinking has come a long way over 2019.
The drone threat is much better understood today than it was a year ago. Since those three costly days at Gatwick Airport, back in December 2018, much has changed. Most notably, the UK Government has expedited the testing, evaluation, and acquisition of counter-drone technologies to prevent such incursions from occurring again.
The chaos playing out across the 24/7 news media, and the realisation that a small drone could cause so much damage, served as a warning to security providers that their airspace is vulnerable to drone interruptions of any kind, whether malicious or not. Drone systems (or Unmanned Arial Systems – UAS) are providing new solutions for many industries, but in the wrong hands, they can cause real damage to both operations and reputations.
Over the last year, a great deal of work has gone into understanding the threat. In December 2019, the Centre for Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) released its first official counter-drone guidance for security practitioners at national infrastructure sites. This information provides background on the tools that CNI users can integrate to protect higher risk locations from drone threats.
For these organisations, CPNI says it’s vital “that robust preparation and planning is undertaken to assess the risks that UAS pose” and it emphasises the importance of preparing site-specific counter-UAS (C-UAS) strategies, based on full, data-driven risk assessments. Perhaps most significantly, the guidance also gives planners some solid parameters for comparing C-UAS technologies. The CPNI’s Catalogue of Security Equipment includes, for the first time, solutions such as DroneTracker that have been evaluated against its detect, track, and identify test standard.
Across the wider security sector, not just at CPNI sites, it’s now understood that drone incursions need to be mitigated against exactly as any other risk does.
According to the Center for the Study of the Drone, there are over 500 counter-drone technologies on the market. But tread carefully – very few of those have been assessed to any meaningful operational and performance standards, and some of them would certainly not be legal to use.
At the crux of this issue is the fact that commercial, off-the-shelf drones are easily accessible for criminals to use for physical and cyber-attacks, as well as corporate and industrial espionage.
We’re also seeing more maturity from organised crime gangs, and more sophistication in their use of drones. Centuries ago, traders in Venice used their newly-invented telescopes to gain commercial advantage by being the first to identify distant ships arriving with cargos – today, drones have been used in attempts to gather commercially sensitive information at locations ranging from racing test circuits to petrochemical stores. The same motivation, perhaps, just newer technology.
It’s not just airports, corporations, or refineries that need to plan for drone incursions. If your organisation is vulnerable to hacking; to industrial espionage; to reconnaissance ahead of a criminal or terrorist attack; to theft of goods; to the smuggling-in of prohibited items – the list is a long one – then drones represent a new tool for hostile actors to use. And they are using them.
The most important requirement for developing a risk mitigation strategy is intelligence, understanding the scale of the threat, and estimating its potential gravity.
Organisations are often surprised at how many drones regularly infringe the airspace around their buildings. This is activity that only a capable detection, tracking, and identification system will reveal. Among all the incursions detected, it’s sometimes possible to discern patterns. For example, if your system lets you not just detect but identify individual drones, you may discover that the same operator is returning to your site regularly, perhaps at the same time – when your security shift changes, or when a sensitive delivery occurs, for example. This is not just a hypothetical example: it’s exactly what Dedrone found when we conducted a survey for one major user in the City of London.
The threat is rapidly evolving, and so are the tools to deal with it.
Counter-drone solutionsAccording to the Center for the Study of the Drone, there are over 500 counter-drone technologies on the market. But tread carefully – very few of those have been assessed to any meaningful operational and performance standards, and some of them would certainly not be legal to use.
It’s likely that this number of tech vendors will diminish rapidly over the next year or two as it becomes clear which technologies really work, which are practical, and which are safe to deploy.
For anybody comparing solutions to address the present risk, here are some things to consider.
Against all these capabilities, you will need to take account of the particular challenges, performance limitations and operating restrictions present at your own site. There are legal considerations to bear in mind too, including GDPR data protection legislation and laws around interception or interference with communications, including the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 and the Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006.
Looking at the various challenges, and the available measures to meet them, one thing is clear. Although the threat of drone incursions is a relatively new one, the security industry has the tools, experience and mindset to deal with it. The important thing is to ask the right questions, not to rush, and to establish an accurate picture of vulnerabilities, current and future.
Download this report, produced in conjunction with Texecom, to discover how increasing processing power, accelerating broadband speeds, cloud-managed solutions and the internet of things and transforming the intruder alarm market, and whether firms are adopting these innovative new technologies.
[…] has been well documented). The evolving threat was very much highlighted to the UK during an incident at Gatwick Airport in 2018, where a small drone caused significant disruption and delays for thousands of passengers. The […]