Hackers grab drone footage
Thursday, December 17, 2009
The Wall Street Journal reports that hackers in the combat zones are downloading video feeds of our drone surveillance and attack aircraft.
In a smart-alec response, I put up on my Twitter page:
Blackfive RE: WSJ on Drone Hackers :Get back at hackers by putting loop of unencrypted vid feed of hacker's home on the drone. :->
The report goes on to say that the DoD officials have known that the video feeds were unencrypted and that they felt that the insurgents were not technically sophisticated enough to figure this out.
...The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said...
You don't have to be Sun Tzu to know that to underestimate your enemy is either grossly incompetent or criminally negligent.
The issue here is not the hackers, but lack of security either due to cost or management or both. A lack of security that smacks of arrogance...