Cyber Experts, Pentagon Skeptical Iran Brought Down U.S. Drone: YahooNews

On Dec. 5th, 2011, Laura Rozen wrote for YahooNews on the RQ-170 drone the US lost to Iran.  The article again discounted the likelihood that the drone was brought down by cyberattack.  Specifically, the article quoted cyber-security expert James Lewis as saying "Iran hacking into the drone is as likely as an Ayatollah standing on a mountain-top and using thought waves to bring it down."

"That's it…slowly…slowly…slowly….got it!  The Americans are gonna be pissed."
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The article again quoted Mr. Lewis: "If you could hack into a drone, you wouldn't use it for some spontaneous fun, you'd save it for a rainy day . . . You'd need to be able to hack either the control network in the U.S. or a satellite.  Neither is easy, and both are probably not something the Iranians can do."

The article also explains that there is some dispute as to how big of a loss this is.  Some experts feel that the drone's stealth technology isn't necessarily groundbreaking.  On the other hand, Mr. Lewis argued that the tech is "dated, yes, but still more than our … foreign friends have."

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Barbara Starr reported for CNN that the drone was on a CIA recon mission.  Interestingly, the article cites a US official who confirmed that the drone crashed, and that the US "briefly considered all potential options for retrieving the aircraft or bombing the wreckage, but those ideas were quickly discarded as impractical. There was also satellite surveillance over the site, which helped confirm the location of the wreckage before the Iranians retrieved it."

The article also mentioned that the drone may have not been directly flying over Iran.

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I'm still interested in this story from the cyberattack angle.  It would make me feel a whole lot better if the drone was in pieces, or that there was a "wreckage" as the article above mentioned, because we could infer that the drone did lose contact with its handlers and plummeted to the ground.  If the Iranians were to produce pictures of the drone largely intact (not that they ever will), I'd be worried that there was a cyberattack.  Who knows.