Whoa! That can't be good!Enemy agents hacking into Great Satan's battle bots in the heat of combat is outrageous.
And old news since the 1996 Bosnia wars.
Noah knows and shares tons of insight, intell and interceptive techniques.
The curious thing about the deal is:
"And here’s the real scandal: Military officials have known about this potential vulnerability since the Bosnia campaign. That was over 10 years ago. And, as Declan McCullagh observes, there have been a series of government reports warning of the problem since then. But the Pentagon assumed that their adversaries in the Middle East and Central Asia wouldn’t have the smarts to tap into the communications link.
"That’s despite presentations like this 1996 doozy from Air Combat Command, which noted that that “the Predator UAV is designed to operate with unencrypted data links.”
Instead of freaking out and surrendering to Taliban (since AFPAK is about to get fully crunk and see a massive rise in warrantless, attorney - client privilge free 'Drones Gone Wild!"), this may actually be an opportunity:
If "Pretty much anyone could intercept the feeds of the drones" then perhaps pretty much everyone intercepting those signals could end up on the rec'ving end of a drone's business end. Turning those searchers into targets - for surveillance, intell or righteous kills or maybe even a surprise visit from an airborne Miranda team (Why not? HUMINT needs refreshing too!)
Pic - "By Your Command" by Ziopredy
Cool posting, Courtney!
ReplyDeleteWow. Fantastic post. You are an info machine!
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't exactly call this a hacking. It's more like a case of something close to MIJI (meaconing, intrusion, jamming, interference) if anything, and technically I think if someone sent up a blast of noise at a certain frequency to those drones, they would come down. Matter of fact, it's the same principle used in blasting a satellite with noise. It would eventually shut down and even possibly lose tracking.
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