http://mashable.com/2014/08/07/how-to-h ... black-hat/Security researchers have been looking into airplane systems' security for some time. Last year, Hugo Teso showed how a hacker could exploit a protocol used to transmit data to commercial airplanes from the ground with an Android phone, potentially giving the hacker the ability to take over the plane, via a malicious radio signal.
As with Santamarta's research, Teso's was also done only at an experimental level. It was dismissed as unlikely to work by European and American aviation authorities.
Also at Black Hat in 2012, another researcher showed he could make nonexistent planes appear on the screen of air traffic controllers, perhaps scaring real planes into trying to avoid them. This hack took advantage of a vulnerability in the next-generation air traffic control system, the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B).
