The title feels like a big understatement. Huge damages done with an extremely easily accessible attack surface and cheap means of conducting an attack.
Good times ahead for anti-drone technology manufacturers.
Good times ahead for anti-drone technology manufacturers.
There has to be motivation, who would benefit from attacking the railway?
In answer to that, the biggest danger is from suicidal people that don't care about the world. The worst train crash in the UK in recent memory was from such a person parking his car on the main line into London, to derail a 125 mph train killing many people.
Today's story is different. The authorities could have no idea who the perpetrator(s) are or this could be 'D-noticed' so that they are not given the oxygen of publicity.
Nothing points to an anti-climate-change group, even though they are starting to cause a stir in the UK. However, if such a group were to take action with drones then they would alienate all chances of support from the public. There would be no benefit for them to do this, plus they could be 'D-noticed'. Despite this we have had activist groups stopping planes before, I think 'Plane Stupid' closed Heathrow by getting onto the runway a few years ago. I don't think that this was an act of an agent provocateur wanting to discredit the Plane Stupid group, dissolving opposition to the third runway in the process.
Dark conspiracies do happen in the UK though. It would be trivial for an evil defence contractor wanting to militarise commercial airspace to do this drone stunt at a politically convenient time, to follow up with expensive solutions to stop these sorts of things happening in the future. They would just need a patsy to make sure they didn't get caught, maybe telling the patsy that they were 'taking action against climate change'. Such a conspiracy is not beyond the possibilities of craziness in UK politics even if it did involve a large amount of people in different agencies.
Then there is the lone guy who has spent far too much time alone with a soldering iron, not heard, with no friends, frustrated. If anything being in a group would hamper such an individual. When it comes to motivation, they would get a power trip from ruining the lives of so many.
We saw the other day a lone guy go viral with some over clever gadget designed to catch parcel thieves with his glitter bomb packed with mobile phones and a stink bomb. It had GPS, custom code and all the things to make it work. Half the people on HN could make such a gadget if they had six months, a workshop and the cash to make it possible.
A lone coder type could put together all the bits needed for what we have today at Gatwick and make sure they didn't get caught. A glorified RSS reader could be built to program the drone to hop into the air as soon as a live departure board had a flight on it. The authorities wouldn't know if the drone is programmed to home in on a plane so they can't just risk it. The 'lone coder' can therefore have a relatively dumb algorithm that just puts the drone into some pre-programmed random position with no comms needed.
If random lone coder happens to live on the flight path they may know precisely where the planes go each and every time, probably right over their house. The only hard problem for them is getting a drone to fly more than a few minutes, batteries being what they are. More than one drone solves that problem, then there is no need for the perp to get caught traipsing across a field to collect his toy. As per glitter bomb guy the other day, if a person has skills they can think through all the 'getting caught' scenarios. They don't even have to get themselves famous or notoriety for some cause, most people flying drones near airports have no such ambitions, they are just 'kids', even if adult.
The car park at Gatwick is right underneath the flightpath. I'm sure this is true of a lot of airports.