Digital Interactive Services
Drone Safety Risk Assessment and Mitigation
In the current pandemic situation, when social distancing is paramount, industry experts believe drone solutions can deliver faster services with great precision, with least human intervention.
The demand for consumer and commercial drones is expected to grow manifolds in the coming years, given its popularity and utility. The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated its demand curve.
However, equipment pricing and uncertain regulations, and risk assessment related to flying of drones have been a constant cause of concern. Several security challenges in the operational ecosystem have been, by far, the biggest reason for worry.
Scammer and cybercriminals are repeatedly looking at ways to exploit the vulnerabilities that exist in the drone procurement processes, networks, and its usage. The industry players must work safeguard against the threat by assessing such vulnerabilities and risks in near real-time, in order to take appropriate and timely actions, while avoiding any impact on legitimate customer experience. To provide end-to-end risk mitigation, it is crucial to first prepare a comprehensive risk assessment for drone operations and a list of vulnerability points at each interface of the drone architecture. For example, in the service acquisition system, an illegitimate registration of drone licenses can not only lead to loss of revenue for the solution provider but could also render it exposed to greater risks, such as terrorist activities. Similarly, risks associated with unauthorized use/sale of drones, subsidy abuse, payment abuse, internal fraud risks, cyberattacks, drone theft/theft by drones, misuse of jamming technologies, etc., require an in-depth assessment to arrive at effective drone risk mitigation solutions.
Countermeasures involve gathering of reliable feed from the drone interfacing systems, automated processing of relevant fields to narrow down on the actionable data. Better the accuracy, easier it is to identify risk patterns and pinpoint potential damages. Once potential vulnerabilities are identified, various anti-abuse controls can be applied to take appropriate action against the defaulters.
In the paper titled – Combating Drone Abuse and Ensuring Compliance – Arun Rishi Kapoor, Senior Lead Analyst, and Anand Chandrashaker, Senior Domain Principal at Infosys BPM, explore the various safety risks faced by the drone ecosystem and discuss strategies that can be employed to mitigate these risks.
The article was first published by Wevolver and the whitepaper herein was published by TelcoProfessionals.
