Iranian-Backed Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones

reply to post by AllSeeingI


brings a new meaning to

there will always be acouple dollar solution to a Million dollar problem

anyhow welcome to the digital battle field where you share intel with the people
your supposedly fighting

edit to add

one more funny thing i have noticed

Fool news i mean fox News

Iranian-Backed Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones


and other sources
example bbc

Iraq insurgents 'hack into video feeds from US drones'

[edit on 17-12-2009 by bodrul]

reply to post by bodrul


fox news should be renamed hoax news ,

the only people who believe fox news are right wing braindead americans .
no one else takes fox news seriously . hell Al jazeera and RT command more respect than hoax news , i mean fox news

reply to post by sadchild01


true, fox news are more nuts then al jazera and so on
then again if people watch the rubbish and believe every word that comes out,
they arent to blame.

reply to post by AllSeeingI


i'm a retired computer guy, and to fix this is not that expensive...but who ever gets the contract will of course charge an arm and a leg. a 100 dollar logic board, coupled with a rather simple software encrypt. security patch and your back in business. even air force computer techs could fix this with no problem and little cost. but someone will talk them into spending millions of taxpayer money to do this job, claiming how "complex" it is...give me a break.
get some DARPA techs out there and have it done for free...they work for the government, for christ's sake

[edit on 18-12-2009 by jimmyx]

Hmmm where is the proof that it was Iranian backed? can not find it in Fixednews site. Only some unknown man who says it.

Anyways, funny that with a spending bill on military thats bigger than any other bill, they can not secure their high end military toys.

Best regards

Loke.:.

Posted in the other thread...

Well... it's not just drones they can hack into... Here's an update to the story!
Source:

Tapping into drones’ video feeds was just the start. The U.S. military’s primary system for bringing overhead surveillance down to soldiers and Marines on the ground is also vulnerable to electronic interception, multiple military sources tell Danger Room. That means militants have the ability to see through the eyes of all kinds of combat aircraft — from traditional fighters and bombers to unmanned spy planes. The problem is in the process of being addressed. But for now, an enormous security breach is even larger than previously thought.

“This is not a trivial solution,” one officer observes. “Almost every fighter/bomber/ISR [intelligence surveillance reconnaissance] platform we have in theater has a ROVER downlink. All of our Tactical Air Control Parties and most ground TOCs [tactical operations centers] have ROVER receivers. We need to essentially fix all of the capabilities before a full transition can occur and in the transition most capabilities need to be dual-capable (encrypted and unencrypted).”

[edit on 12/18/2009 by x2Strongx]

Distraction while capturing the Iraqi oil well today maybe? Oh, here comes Iran with some aggression.... watch out.

(oops, i didn't notice that another poster had already brought this up. meh, my bad.)

... militants have the ability to see through the eyes of all kinds of combat aircraft — from traditional fighters and bombers to unmanned spy planes. The problem is in the process of being addressed. But for now, an enormous security breach is even larger than previously thought.

The military initially developed the Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receiver, or ROVER, in 2002. The idea was let troops on the ground download footage from Predator drones and AC-130 gunships as it was being taken. Since then, nearly every airplane in the American fleet — from F-16 and F/A-18 fighters to A-10 attack planes to Harrier jump jets to B-1B bombers has been outfitted with equipment that lets them transmit to ROVERs.

Not Just Drones

so they spend a couple of billion in upgrading the air force, but they can't seem to spend a couple of minutes to think if they're implementing the whole thing properly. i don't know what to think anymore, this can't be typical military short-sightedness and its just way too much to assume that this particular vulnerability has been put there (planned) since the beginning.

so does anybody know where we can get some footage from a raptor? if not then i'd settle for an AC-130.

[edit on 12.18.09 by toreishi]

Originally posted by JJay55
Distraction while capturing the Iraqi oil well today maybe? Oh, here comes Iran with some aggression.... watch out.

Reminds me very much of the false flag that the Germans did right before invading Poland.

They simply had an elite squad of German Soldiers dress up as Polish Soldiers and attack a German Port close to the border.

Then of course they claimed that Poland attacked Germany and invaded Poland.

Why exactly would Iran need to capture ONE Iraqi Oil Well? Iran can hardly manage its own vast oil reserves. Capturing one Iraqi Oil well has no strategic or economic value to Iran.

In fact it is a classic false flag type of operation. A small unit is easy to find a foreign country's uniform and equipment for and be comprised of people who are fluent in Farsi the Iranian Lanquage.

The reality is if Iran was invading Iraq, it would do so with masses of troops not a 12 man squad.

Militarily for Iran the operation makes absolutely no sense from any angle or perspective.

What's sad is there are actually people so ignorant of history and how staged false flag operations like this have been used in so many cases that the only times a small squad of troops have invaded a foreign country have been staged false flag attacks carried out by the country that is supposedly being invaded.

What's sadder still is that there are people who are so prejudiced, biased and brainwashed they actually believe things like this as they appear on the surface.

Originally posted by Loke.
Hmmm where is the proof that it was Iranian backed? can not find it in Fixednews site. Only some unknown man who says it.

Anyways, funny that with a spending bill on military thats bigger than any other bill, they can not secure their high end military toys.

Best regards

Loke.:.

In a fun side... if they are.. The Iran gov. must request refund from insurgents because they backed/requested $25 for a software that we can get for free.

Hmm, I hate it when there are duplicate threads. This is the fourth of its kind and every time someone creates another thread with the same news posts like mine (below) get lost and never read:

UAV personal are hard to find, they are on demand BIG time. I dont think every state has one operational on a daily basis. However, I would say they have Predators/UAVs stored in military camps in each state.

Its not "hacking" as such, these UAVs use no encryption and are very expensive to build nevermind paying for high-tech encryption. These UAVs have a 2 second delay in response so, if there was "ever" encryption on them, then that delay between the UAV pilot and the UAV will not be 2 seconds, it would be like 12/24 seconds. So, the military probably decided to just fly them without encryption due to the delay in the response from UAV to Pilot.

So, its not "hacking", its "intercepting". Hacking would mean that you would have to crack the encryption in order to get access to this. Watching a UAV in Iraq is as easy as tuning into a television, although its easy for satellite professionals..its hard as hell for the layman.

The vulnerability has always been there from the beginning. As it stands, from the UAV -> Satellite -> Ground Satellite -> UAV Pilot communication transmissions have a 2 second delay, like lag on a high performance multiplayer online game.

A 2 second delay is the best they can get, the best they have always had to deal with. If they ever applied encryption into the SatCom transmitter and UAV receiver that would change the binary commands and make them longer. So instead of the usual 64 one's and zero's being send as one command, the encryption would lengthen the binary command to, say, 768 one's and zero's (x12). That would increase the delay from 2 seconds to 24 seconds.

Having a 24 second delay on a UAV is not good, especially when it costs millions and would be of no use targeting tanks or target painting them with the laser.

Here is an intro to the UAV (below) that can be intercepted (not hacked). Its just like tuning into a Satellite TV channel, just get the co-ordinates correct and you can capture the raw video and audio. You can do this with anything that uses RF. I remember someone telling me that once (back in the early 90s) they were tuning in their satellite dish and (unknown to them) a CCTV video feed appeared and it was from inside their local police station.

Triangulation of WiFi (2.4Ghz) is not that easy, although not impossible. The near and far field obstructs the triangulation and you could get an incorrect location. For Wifi, GPS, Kismet, NetStumbler and Google Maps can be used. All RF is the same, apart from the secure lines which can also be intercepted.

EDIT: Taking control of the UAV is impossible for the insurgents, all they can do is capture the audio and video. That is it.

Skygrabber can only capture data (Video, Audio etc), it can not control it. In saying that, you could tune into a Predator, copy the latitude and longitude and maybe have a script on your computer to override the commands being sent from the UAV control box, transmitter, to the satellite, to the UAV. You could possibly just use the latitude and longitude of the satellite and send commands to it, although a user login may be prompted.

I am guessing it is like sending commands from a WiFi antenna connected to a laptop running something like "aireplay-ng" from Linux to a wireless AP. Only a satellite instead of a wireless AP and a satellite transmitter instead of a WiFi antenna.

I think its quite possible, and TPTB could use it as a false flag operation because the masses know nothing about computer/satellite hacking.

Sorry guys, but seriously I posted this one every single DUPLICATE thread, you know why? Because people don't get to read the information because new threads like this one keep rising. There are people who purposely grab someone else's story in order to grab the flag points, its sad.

Forgive me MODs for the quotage, but it seems to be that this thread (somehow) is more popular than the more original ones. So, by quoting my posts in the other threads everyone can get a good idea.


[edit on 18/12/2009 by the_denv]

reply to post by ThePeoplesSoldier


Curiously enough, Iran and Iraq have pretty open borders. In fact they're economic and regional partners. Maybe not to the degree of say, the Us and Canada... But at least as much as the US and mexico.

So when you see Mecixans come through the checkpoint, and then go home with some shopping bags, you no doubt feel they're up to no good, right?

Odds are these Iranians are guys buying cheap porno. Can't get the stuff in Iran, you know.

They don't hack anything. They merely intercept the ROVER feed that is broadcast omni-directionally for the express purpose of making it easy for troops on the ground to receive intelligence. This signal is sent out by many kinds of aerial assets, such as UAVs. Actually, this is very similar to what your TV does - It intercepts the signals sent from an antenna i.e. TV station. Solution: encrypt the data within the signal, which is exactly what the military is doing. Probably nothing more than a software update, which should be relatively easy to develop and implement.



Also, ROVER is a completely separate from the system that controls the UAV.

[edit on 19/12/2009 by C0bzz]

Originally posted by mikelee
Those video feeds are via RF (radio frequency) and I'll bet that no one in the US military thought encryption was needed for those types of feeds. However I bet that now they will encrypt those video feeds and that twenty-six dollar software will be returned to Radio Shack.

I was thinking the same thing.

I guess I'm a little surprised they're not encrypted already as the idea of interception of the signal should have been thought of, but they know now so it's just a matter of time before they are encrypted.

reply to post by Arbitrageur


They can't encrypt it unless they invent new technology to deal with the delay times between HQ to UAV. As I said before and as someone else said, its just like tuning in your TV.