The use of drones is skyrocketing with the technology being used to evaluate weather and as weaponry. The Unmanned Aircraft System, UAS, is holding its first UAS Hack event. It gives university-level students an opportunity to evaluate and help improve drone technology in the United States. 

One of the students taking part, Zack Kornreich, has loved working in tech since he was a child. 

“I just fell in love with technology and how everything works under the hood," he said. 

Kornreich is a computer engineering masters student at Binghamton University. While hardware is his passion, he’s gained a love for cybersecurity through experiences in college.

“It's really trying to make breakthrough finds and breakthrough technological advancements, which is the security industry," Kornreich said. "It's really cool to me.”

That’s the goal at the UAS Hack challenge. Students are trained on how to evaluate the security of UAS, identify potential threats and provide feedback to manufacturers. 

“So Monday and Tuesday were a lot of 'here's tools and how to apply them to breach these security features,'" he said. "Yesterday and today have been working on making these projects and attacking these drones and seeing what we can break, what we can circumvent and what vulnerabilities we can exploit.”

"What we’re doing is we're putting the cyber physical system in front of these students, the computer that runs it, the network that supports it, all of the signals, all of the data that's going flying through the air to this thing," said Eric Thayer, the chief engineer for the AIS. "Giving them an opportunity to look at it, understand how it functions and try to figure out how it may have been designed in a way that it could be broken." 

With drones becoming more and more prominent, knowing everything about the technology, how it works and how to protect it is vital. 

“You can see all over the place that they're like the new most common form of weaponry," Kornreich said. "So the more that we can explore this side of technology, the more we can advance there, I think that the more secure and overall more developed this world can be.”