ShadoWalker's Musings, Realizations and Rants!

This is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever read.    The insurgents did not hack into the drone, they intercypted a non encrypted video feed that the military has known could be a problem for 10 years but did nothing to fix.

A few years ago the military discovered USB flash drives with top secret information were being stolen by cleaning staff in Afghanistan and sold on the street, that top secret information was stored unencrypted on the drives.

When will the military learn something the private industry has known for decades, if it is important no one else see it encrypt it.  Encryption is affordable, secure, and easy to implement and there is absolutely no excuse for the video feed not having been encrypted from the very beginning.

“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 hacking was possible because the remotely flown planes have an unprotected communications link.

The Defense Department has addressed the issue, first discovered a year ago, by working to encrypt all its drone video feeds from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the defense official said.”

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