Pentagon: Insurgents intercepted drone spy videos

WASHINGTON — Insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan have hacked into live video feeds from Predator drones, a key weapon in a Pentagon spy system that serves as the military’s eyes in the sky for surveillance and intelligence collection.

Though militants could see the video, there is no evidence they were able to jam the electronic signals from the unmanned aerial craft or take control of the vehicles, a senior defense official said Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence issues.

Obtaining the video feeds can provide insurgents with critical information about what the military may be targeting, including buildings, roads and other facilities.

Shiite fighters in Iraq used off-the-shelf software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. The interception, first done there at least a year ago, was possible because the remotely flown planes had unprotected communications links.

Within the last several months, the military has found evidence of at least one instance where insurgents in Afghanistan also monitored U.S. drone video, a second defense official said. He had no details on how many times it was done in Afghanistan or by which group.

The Defense Department has addressed the issue and is working to encrypt all of its drone video feeds from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, defense officials said. One defense official noted that upgrading the encryption in the drones is a lengthy process because there are at least 600 unmanned vehicles, along with thousands of ground stations to address.

Officials said that systems in key threat areas were upgraded first.

Dale Meyerrose, former chief information officer for the U.S. intelligence community, compared the problem to street criminals listening to police scanners.

“This was just one of the signals, a broadcast signal, and there was no hacking. It is the interception of a broadcast signal,” said Meyerrose, who worked to field the unmanned systems in the 1990s, when he was a senior Air Force officer.

The problem, he said, is that when the drones were first being developed they were using commercial equipment, which as time goes on could become vulnerable to intercepts.

The Predator, also currently used in the hunt for Al Qaeda and other militants in Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere, can fly for hours remotely controlled by pilots thousands of miles away. It can fly armed or unarmed, and is part of a growing arsenal of such craft that includes the Reaper and Raven as well as a new, high-tech video sensor system called the Gorgon Stare, being installed on Reapers.

The military has known about the vulnerability for more than a decade but assumed adversaries would not be able to exploit it.

Then in December 2008, the military apprehended a Shiite militant in Iraq whose laptop contained files of intercepted drone video feeds, the Journal reported. In July, they found pirated feeds on other militant laptops, leading some officials to conclude that groups trained and funded by Iran were regularly intercepting feeds and sharing them with multiple extremist groups.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates asked the Pentagon’s intelligence chief, James R. Clapper Jr., to look into the problem and coordinate the work to address it. Officials said that when the intercepts were discovered in July 2008, it raised concerns, but technical adjustments were not difficult and were put in motion quickly.

The hacking is just another example of how formidable and inventive the extremists can be. The U.S. has spent billions of dollars, for instance, fighting homemade bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, the No. 1 killer of troops and the weapon of choice by militants who have easy access to the materials needed to make them and use modern telecommunications networks to exchange information about how to improve them.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the military continually evaluates the technologies it uses and quickly corrects any vulnerabilities found.

-- Associated Press

Photo: An armed MQ-9 Reaper, seen in an undated photo, flies over southern Afghanistan during a combat mission. Credit: U.S. Air Force

Comments

[alan]

How does the military even conceive of an intelligence gathering device and NOT have encryption be a part of its design document? This is unbelievable.

[DAVEGOOD57]

How can anyone expect the feds to administer something as basic as health insurance if they spend billions of dollars on weapons systems that can be hacked into for less than $25?
If this is an indication of our defense capabilities maybe we should all revert to building bomb shelters on our backyards.
Crass stupidity of the highest order, maybe even on par with the brilliant Pacific Fleet Admiral who had most of the fleet bottled up in a narrow harbor on Dec 7 1941

[sal]

this has been all over the nerd news...This statement is an over exaggeration: "The hacking is just another example of how formidable and inventive the extremists can be..." There is nothing "formidable" about it. Anyone can do this with a little know how. Inventive, yes. But, with the lacks of network security through out the defence network, this is no surprise.

[twitter.com/cavscout90]

what a shame. the military spends billions to support our combat troops but didn't think it was wise to encrypt the video feeds.

[Erich]

"The military has known about the vulnerability for more than a decade but assumed adversaries would not be able to exploit it."

This sums up our military and intelligence communities in the past decade or two—idiotic.

[Dude From The Bronx]

Wonderful! So this means that pretty soon anybody with a Wii can hijack one of our drones by remote control and bring it down. Just when you think you've built a better mouse trap, somebody comes along with a better mouse.

[kb]

dosent seem like the brightest idea to have a remote control intelligence gathering and weapons platform device which has no encryption and uses standard video signals. i know this was also an issue during the first iraq war when video feeds were going through unencrypted commericial satellites, and any jo shmo with a satellite receiver could watch them. hbo had better protection.

[Roger Krueger]

This isn't "formidible and inventive", this is picking off an unencrypted video feed, most of the jr. high kids in a nice neighborhood could figure it out. What committee of techno-illiterate bozos thought transmitting sensitive video unencrypted was O.K.?

[curtisthecurtis]

Somehow I'm not surprised... a multi-million dollar weapon/surveillance system hacked by a dude in a cave possibly using software he may have gotten for less than 30$ bucks...so now they are encrypting the communication...brilliant too bad they didn't think about that a few years ago when they designed the plane...but I'm sure Beoing isn't too disappointed with the extra millions they'll get to "upgrade" the system...even though that should have been part of the design in the first place. Imagine if a guy in a cave can do this, what could the Chinese and Russians (you know the guys most of our weapons systems were really designed to fight against) or some other guys with actual money and actual access to high technology do...

[Neuromancer9]

From the Beirut Barracks to the USS Cole, to the 9/11 attacks, the under-estimation of the the enemy continues.

[Heather]

This doesn't add up. Anybody nerdy enough to name the video sensor system the "Gorgon Stare" would have encrypted those feeds.