Sniper rifle

Sandvik and Auger demonstrated that the aiming computer of theTrackingPoint XS1 precision guided firearm was vulnerable to third party hacking.

A sniper rifle is a high-powered rifle, capable of accurate fire, at a long range. The sniper, the soldier who weilds the rifle typically undergoes special training, not only in marksmanship, but in concealment.

Modern sniper rifles will mount a very powerful sniper-scope, a kind of telescope, fixed to the rifle.

In the 2010s some firms tried to develop sniper rifles, with sniper-scopes, where embedded computers would try to increase the shooter's accuracy.

The $13,000 Tracking Point sniper rifle came equipped with computer aided optics. The optics could record the video. The manufacturer's thought this would be useful for military users, during their training, and for civilian hunters, who would show the video to fellow hunters, to brag about their expertise. The manufacturers also enabled the optics to employ WiFi. They thought this would be useful for civilian hunters to broadcast their saved video to the hunting buddies they wanted to brag to. And they thought it would useful for those training snipers to be able to view the same image the shooter was looking at, in real time. What the manufacturer overlooked was the vulnerability to being hacked that WiFi opened.

Tracking Point claimed that the optics could give a merely ordinary marksman the same accuracy as one of the world's best snipers, through the use of artificial intelligence.

Runa Sandvik and Michael Auger, computer security experts, spent some time with one of these rifles, and found it was relatively easy to remotely set parameters which would consistently make the rifle less accurate. An outsider could, for instance, reset the computer's idea of what the bullet weighed, including give it impossible weights. They also found it possible to "brick the optic's computer - ie give it instructions that would, essentially, cause it to self-destruct, so it could never work again.