2009-12-17

Imagine Accessing Enemy Sensors

According to the Wall Street Journal, US Predator drones have an unprotected, unencrypted comlink for live video feeds, and any retarded terrorist with a laptop can exploit it . . . and some have.  This has been considered a potential security hole since the 1990's, but wasn't fixed then because it was thought no one would know to exploit it.   And even as they've known for the past year that it's being exploited, they still haven't fixed it.

Seriously?  You've got to be frakking kidding me.

Yes, sure, this doesn't relate necessarily to command and control of the aircraft . . . it isn't like some terrorist can link a Predator to his Microsoft Flight Simulator and do whatever he wanted to with it.   But it does mean that they can easily check to see if anybody is watching them, analyze drone routes, and so on.   That's more than enough of a serious breach for me.  

For all the talk of computer and communications security in the Vs. Debate, real-life real-world-military examples of pure stupidity like this . . . especially from the U.S. . . . are baffling.  Imagine having ready access to the sensor data of an opposing ship, so you know where and when to hide.  Even in Enterprise's third season, the Andorians were a little alarmed at sharing their sensor data about a mutual opponent with Enterprise because of the potential security risk . . . meaning even Brannon Braga understood that you keep that stuff under wraps.  

Oh good grief, Brannon Braga just outwitted the US military.  How sad is that?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why am I not in the least bit surprised? Examples of this sort of flagrant stupidity sprout like mushrooms in any large, wide-reaching organisation. Armies, corporations, governments, etc... They all pull shit like this... all the time...

watchdog said...

The problem came from the Pentagon, they were unwilling to pay the extra money to add encryption software to the drones. I am in the Signal Corps, all of our equipment can only work when we use highly classified electronic keys to enable them. We were shaking our heads at this when we heard about it as well