Saturday, January 23, 2010

Military Tech News: HAHAHAH Predator (UAV) being hacked by Iraqi insurgents


"I have my eye upside down, which is normal....do i look like i'm flying upside down ?"


Watched Transformers before ? or some conspiracy war movie ? or some war movie uses modern high-tech weaponary ? or even played COD: MW2 ? Well, heck i'm sure you've heard of the PREDATOR UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) , simply put it " No-pilot vechicle" be it aircraft, land or sea.

After scrolling through some websites, I came across this news about predator being hacked (not actually hacked) or eavesdropped by insurgents, with no extra high-tech pew-pew James Bond device. How ? with just a help of a $26 software from Russia, with love.

The program is called "SkyGrabber", not many heard or even cares about it (which i do sometimes, lol).
It's capable of capturing live satellite video feeds from PREDATOR UAV and the insurgents has been using it frequently for free-information peek. U.S Pentagon acknowledge they had such flaw since back in the 1990s, the transmission was unencrypted, its like a open Wi-Fi.

SkySoftware, the people who made SkyGrabber said they didn't know their software could do that. The software originally is used for intercepting music, videos, or live feeds downloaded from the internet by another user.

The latest "Reaper" drone, is based on the same transmission security as the Predator, each of these drones costs a freaking bunch, and still it's shipped with the same vulnerability. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. is the company who is responsible of building and creating the drones.

“ Who were the lame engineers who came up with a system that runs without encryption? Even the graduates of the local high school programming courses know better than to leave to chance an important security hole. ”


So people, be sure to keep your devices especially wireless devices updated with security if you're not a techie expert. Duh, even experts will get their PC hacked when someone intentionally hacks though your security.

Source: Wall Street Journal