Commercial quadcopters have been on the mainstream gadget scene for 15 years, proliferating across industries and among hobbyists. There’s a swanky DJI store on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, and you probably have a neighbor, not to mention a roofer, who owns a drone. So when researchers at the embedded-device security firm Red Balloon started seeing surprising quadcopter accessories on Chinese shopping platforms like Temu and AliExpress, they didn’t think much of it at first. As with any popular gadget type, there’s a whole ecosystem of niche, wacky, and comical add-ons available for drones. But the more Red Balloon CEO Ang Cui thought about it, the more unsettled he and his colleagues became about how cheap and easy it would be for anyone to buy seemingly disparate add-ons that could easily turn a mainstream quadcopter into a war machine. The accessories the researchers found include AI drone guidance modules—essentially small mounted cameras that use object recognition to identify humans and road vehicles at long range—and miles-long fiber optic tethers. Like plugging an ethernet cable directly into your laptop, miles-long tethers allow drones to fly around a large area without being vulnerable to disruption by signal jammers.

Full report : Chinese ecommerce giants including Temu and AliExpress sell deadly drone accessories like those used by soldiers in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.