On Dec. 15th, 2011, Scott Peterson reported for the Christian Science Monitor that Iranian officials have claimed they hacked into a US RQ-170 drone and tricked it into landing in Iran. Apparently the Christian Science Monitor scored an exclusive interview with the Iranian engineer who is now reverse engineering the drone.
I guess I shouldn't say that the drone was hacked, so much as it was tricked. According to the article:
"Iranian electronic warfare specialists were able to cut off communications links of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel" by interfering with the drone's GPS. The Iranians were then able to reprogram the drone's GPS coordinates so the drone thought that Iran was the drone's home base in Afghanistan. According to the article, the "spoofing" technique allowed the Iranians to make the drone "land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications.”
The article goes on to say that the Iranians developed this technique from reverse-engineering previously captured American drones. The weak point appears to be the GPS signals. The article mentions that military experts have long acknowledged that GPS is vulnerable.
There's a lot more to the article, so take a look here.
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Granted, this article relays the claims of an Iranian engineer, so it's possible it's not necessarily true. However, GPS is an acknowledged weakness. Logically, the Iranians wouldn't have had to "hack" the drone if they did indeed spoof it. It sounds possible. If this is the case, we really have to wonder how vulnerable our drone fleet really is, and we really have to wonder what cyber capabilities the Iranians possess.
I'll post more as it comes.
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