Cyberpoaching

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Cyberpoaching: Why Hackers Pose a Deadly Threat to Endangered Animals

By Max Knoblauch
5 March 2014

The most dangerous poacher of the 21st century might do his work behind a computer screen.

The attempted hacking of a Bengal tiger's GPS collar in the Panna Tiger Reserve last July alerted the world to a new kind of threat to its wildlife: cyberpoaching. Since then, many proactive wildlife experts have been trying to figure out how to fight a poacher who sits half a world away from the animals they're targeting.

Faced with small budgets and an ever-evolving enemy, solving the problem is no easy task for conservationists.

The fact that a GPS collar was the first device poachers targeted is an important detail. Though providing valuable information about the location and migration patterns of select wildlife, the data that the collars transmit is also extremely valuable to parties wishing to do harm to the animals. With certain collars, poachers can pinpoint the animals via their real-time locations to distances within 10 feet. If poachers were to successfully gain access to this data, killing the animals would almost be too easy.

But ease isn't the only incentive for poachers to get their hands on GPS collar data. Considering the high expense involved in affixing collars to endangered species (the collar worn by the Bengal tiger mentioned above cost about $5,000), the devices are typically saved for only the rarest animals — rhinos, tigers, snow leopards and elephants. Unsurprisingly, these species also happen to fetch the most money on the black market.

Crawford Allan, the head of the Wildlife Crime Technology Project at World Wildlife Fund (WWF), works directly with conservationists across the globe to preemptively prepare for the coming wave of technologically savvy poachers.

"It's like an arms race — a technology race," Allan tells Mashable. "It's always this constant battle of trying to get one step ahead of the poachers."

Where rangers have rusty shotguns, poachers have AK-47s. Where rangers have AK-47s, poachers have silenced weapons and night vision. According to Allan, poachers will continue finding more sophisticated ways to take out animals as long as there's a huge profit and a low risk for them.

Of course, smart collars and other GPS enabled devices are by no means an easy hack. The Panna tiger's collar hacking proved unsuccessful and no such attempts have been made since. Nonetheless, Allan warns that the devices and the conservationists using them have a lot of room to improve in terms of cybersecurity before they can breathe easy.

"Criminals out there are making so much money from this that they can really afford to quite readily buy technologies and use technologies that could potentially give the game away about patrolling patterns and animal locations," he says. Poaching is big business, and tech is about as smart an investment as you can make.

On the anti-poaching side of things, a lack of technological skill and adaptation remains a looming issue. Many ranging groups, for example, still use simple radio systems to communicate. Any criminal with a bit of patience can tap into these signals and get an understanding of where the rangers are and what they're doing.

"If you've got systems set in place to protect wildlife and don't have well-equipped, well-trained rangers on the ground to respond to the alarm bells, it really is pointless," Allan says. His organization's recent work in Namibia, sponsored by a Google Global Impact Award, tested innovative anti-poaching methods that will provide additional security against tech savvy poachers.

"We helped trial-test a new system called an RF Mesh radio network," he says. "All the radio communications from the rangers are fed through [the network] securely." RF Mesh is a military-grade, encrypted data streaming system that is extremely difficult to gain access to through technological means. While still in experimental stages, this sort of technology could all but eliminate the potential for future data breaches like that of the Panna tiger.

According to some conservationists, smart collars are currently of relatively minor importance in terms of protecting animals.

"They are one part of a much bigger tool box," says Richard Vigne, CEO of Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. "Because of their cost and limited battery life, we put much greater store in covering the ground and good intelligence."

While only a small number of animals are actually fixed with smart collars in the wild, the poaching technology race requires preemptive measures to improve the future security and effectiveness of the devices.

"It's a sad state of affairs, but the war here on wildlife means you have to take some much more serious measures to try and turn the tide," Allan says. "I think that time is coming."