ISIS might use commercially-available drones to launch a weaponised 9/11-style attack, warn British experts

A team of British researchers believes that the Islamic State terrorist group could easily obtain commercially-available drones and outfit it with weapons to launch a 9/11-style attack against others.

Oxford Research Group's Remote Control project in the UK has warned events, places and things – including a summit, power station or prime minister's car – could be targeted by an unmanned aerial vehicle that could be modified by ISIS to create a terror outfit.

The Remote Control project based their conclusion on the observations made by them during the analysis of 200 commercially-available drones. According to the project observations, these drones can easily be obtained by the public from local stores or on the Internet.

The project also found that a number of such drones can be easily weaponised and converted into drop explosives to conduct a large-scale attack.

“A range of terrorist, insurgent, criminal, corporate and activist threat groups have already demonstrated the ability to use civilian drones for attacks and intelligence gathering,” reads the report's executive summary.

To support its claims, the report cites the example of Hezbollah's violations of Israeli airspace "with a fleet of an estimated 200 unmanned aerial vehicles" and the April 2015 incident when a drone carrying radioactive sand was dropped over the Japanese prime minister's office.

The team of British experts suggests employing a number of regulatory, passive and active countermeasures to prevent the possibility of such hostile attack by the ISIS.

Regulatory counter measures limit the ability of the terrorist group to procure and fly the drones. In addition, it aims toward limiting the capability of the commercially-available drones.

Passive countermeasures include an alert system for the security in case a drone is spotted within a no-fly zone or defensive perimeter around a mobile or static target.

Active countermeasures, although limited, could be deployed if a drone still poses a threat despite passive countermeasures.

However, the British thinktank refuse to agree that the deployment of such measures would completely eliminate or control the remote-control warfare. The ultimate solution, they say, is to deal with the root cause or threat in the first place, that is, the ISIS.

“Drones are a game changer in the wrong hands. The government needs to take this threat seriously and commit to a range of countermeasures that still allow for legitimate commercial and personal use,” said the report's lead author Chris Abbott in a BBC report.