Ruben Santamarta, a security researcher at security firm IOActive, has claimed a popular model of voyage data recorders (VDRs) is easy to hack.
Writing in a blog, Santamarta said the Furuno VR-3000, a popular VDR model, has many vulnerabilities which could allow hackers to execute arbitrary commands with complete root privileges, according to a report from Hacked.com.
“After spending some hours reversing the different binaries, it was clear that security is not one of [the] main strengths of this equipment…The mechanism to update firmware is flawed. Encryption is weak,” Santamarta wrote.
Hackers could “access, modify, or erase data stored on the VDR, including voice communications, radar images, and navigation data”, the security expert claimed.
Furuno has promised a patch to fix the problem.
