Unencrypted Drone Video Hacked by Iraqi Insurgents
Unmanned flying drones are widely used in battle theaters including Afghanistan and Iraq. Today it has been revealed that Shiite militants and other insurgents have been using a Russian software tool SkyGrabber, designed for stealing satellite video, to hack into the video feeds of these drones. It gives these militants the ability to spy on the US’s drones, which are used to surveil large areas of these countries.
It’s unbelievable to me that these video feeds aren’t properly encrypted, and that off-the-shelf video hacking tools can crack into these feeds. The US military is working hard to retrofit the video systems to have encryption.
December 17th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
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.
Never “UNDER ESTIMATE” the enemy .