[Image Source: Sepahnews/AP]
Somebody had to have had their head up their
ass, arrogant beyond belief (or just not care,) to not realize losing drones
was a bad plan
You
will have to go to the articles to get the full impact of the photos and video
Iran:
Yes, We Hacked the U.S.'s Drone, and Here's How We Did It
Sources:
Christian Science Monitor, ETH Zurich, MSNBC, Fox News
By
Jason Mick
December
15, 2011
Iran rebuffs skepticism with a detailed
description of attack, which experts call "certainly possible"
It sounds like a scene out of a spy
movie -- highly trained national paramilitary operatives harshly testing a
foreign agent until they break and do their bidding. But that's exactly what
Iran is claiming it did to a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency spy drone.
In an unconfirmed, yet fascinating
report in The Christian Science Monitor, an unnamed "Iranian
engineer" claims that Iran used its torture testing from past crashed
drones to break the captured drone and bend it to the command of the Iranian
authorities, forcing it into a soft landing so they could probe the secrets of
its fully intact body.
I. Iran warned the U.S. of its Capabilities
The report points to claims Iran made
in September that it was able to "take control" of U.S. guided
weapons or surveillance devices.
Iranian Gen. Moharam Gholizadeh, the
deputy for electronic warfare at the air defense headquarters of the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), told the Far News, "We have
a project on hand that is one step ahead of jamming, meaning 'deception' of the
aggressive systems... we can define our own desired information for it so the
path of the missile would change to our desired destination...all the movements
of these [enemy drones are being watched]" and "obstructing"
their work was "always on our agenda."
At the time the claims by Iran -- under
pressure for its suspected nuclear weapons development program -- were largely
dismissed as factless national rhetoric.
Similarly, when Iranian state-run media
revealed last week that it had captured a U.S. intelligence drone, many experts
sneered at Iran's claims that it "hacked" the drone. Remarked
an analyst to the Defense News, "[it'd be] like dropping a
Ferrari into an ox-cart technology culture."
But while the detailed description of
the "electronic ambush" from the interview with the Iranian engineer
has not been verified by U.S. military officials, the U.S. gov't and public are
now forced to set aside their prejudices and look at those claims far more
seriously.
[Image Source: Sepahnews/AP]
According to the source, the first
thing the Middle Eastern nation's "cyberwarfare experts" did was to
jam the drone's signal. While the report does not specifically mention
this, the engineer's claims of using past crashed drones to derive the attack
indicate that Iranian experts may have used drones to determine the encrypted
control frequencies that the drone was communicating on.
Further evidence that adversaries in
the region are on to U.S. UAV feed frequencies comes from the fact that in 2009
Iraqi Shiite militants intercepted live, unencrypted video feeds off a U.S.
predator drone, using only off-the-shelf hardware. At the time, Iranian
involvement was suspected.
In July and in 2010 Iran claimed to
have shot down drones hovering near its nuclear facitilities.
II. "Downing Drones 101"
Using its knowledge of the frequency,
the engineer claims, Iran initiated its "electronic ambush" by
jamming the bird's communications frequencies, forcing it into auto-pilot.
States the source, "By putting noise [jamming] on the
communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses
its brain."
The team then use a technique known as
"spoofing" -- sending a false signal for the purposes of obfuscation
or other gain. In this case the signal in questions was the GPS feed,
which the drone commonly acquires from several satellites. By spoofing
the GPS feed, Iranian officials were able to convince it that it was in
Afghanistan, close to its home base. At that point the drone's autopilot
functionality kicked in and triggered the landing. But rather than
landing at a U.S. military base, the drone victim instead found itself captured
at an Iranian military landing zone.
Spoofing the GPS is a clever method, as
it allows hackers to "land on its own where we wanted it to, without
having to crack the [encrypted] remote-control signals and
communications."
[Image Source: Reuters]
While the technique did not require
sophistication from a cryptography perspective, it was not entirely trivial,
either, as it required precise calculations to be made to give the drone the
proper forged distance and find and fine an appropriate altitude landing strip
to make sure the drone landed as it did in Afghanistan. The Iranian
engineers knew the details of the landing site, because the drone had been
confirmed in grainy photos to be landing at a base in Khandar, Afghanistan.
Despite the careful calculations, the
drone still sustained a dent in its wing and underbody (though it did not have
the usual signs of a high-speed collision). During its press conferences,
the Iranian military covered this damage with anti-American banners.
[Image Source: Iranian state television]
The engineer explained this damage
commenting, "If you look at the location where we made it land and the
bird's home base, they both have [almost] the same altitude. There was a
problem [of a few meters] with the exact altitude so the bird's underbelly was
damaged in landing; that's why it was covered in the broadcast footage."
The approach echoes an October security
conference presentation [PDF] in Chicago, in which ETH Zurich researchers laid
out how to use interference and GPS spoofing to more gently down a drone.
III. Is the West "Underestimating" Iran?
Iran warns that the west is
underestimating its growing technological prowess. A former senior
official is quoted as saying, "There are a lot of human resources in
Iran.... Iran is not like Pakistan."
Deputy IRGC commander Gen. Hossein
Salami, stated this week, "Technologically, our distance from the
Americans, the Zionists, and other advanced countries is not so far [as] to
make the downing of this plane seem like a dream for us … but it could be
amazing for others."
The Christian Science Monitor
report cites an unnamed European intelligence source as claiming that Iran
in an unreported incident managed to "blind" a CIA spy satellite by
"aiming a laser burst quite accurately" at its optics. And in
September Google Inc.'s (GOOG) security certificates were hacked to give access
to 300,000 Iranian citizens Gmail accounts, in what circumstantial evidence
indicated was a "state-driven attack," potentially designed to ferret
out spys or dissidents.
For now Iran military and government
workers -- including the engineer -- are giddy with joy at their success,
according to the report. The source is stated as remarking, "We all
feel drunk [with happiness] now. Have you ever had a new laptop? Imagine
that excitement multiplied many-fold."
What they captured was no mere Reaper
or Predator -- it was an advanced RQ-170 Sentinel design, made by Lockheed
Martin Corp. (LMT) for the CIA.
He said that members of the National
Guard initially feared that the drone was rigged to auto destruct, but eagerly
moved to inspect it anyways because they "were so excited they could not
stay away."
III. U.S.: Drone Missions to Iran Will Continue
It's important to remember that while
the attack described in the report sounds very feasible, it has not been
confirmed by the U.S. government, and may never be. It now appears that
the government is at least acknowledging that the drone is a real U.S. drone,
as opposed to early reports in which some officials indicated it might be fake
Iranian propaganda/publicity stunt.
Former U.S. Navy electronic warfare
specialist Robert Densmore told The CS Monitor that Iran's claims
were "certainly possible", adding, "I wouldn't say it's easy,
but the technology is there... Even modern combat-grade GPS [is] very
susceptible [to manipulation]."
The U.S. has claimed that the drone was
not spying, but was flying a standard mission over Afghanistan, when it
suffered a "unspecified technical malfunction" and went of course,
landing in Iranian hands. They declined to explain how the
drone -- flying at high altitude -- could have avoided sustaining serious
damage.
U.S. President Barrack Obama has
requested that Iran return the drone to U.S. officials. Iran has refused.
IRGC Brig. Gen. Mohammad Hejazi, comments, "That is a shameless
demand raised by the U.S. President. They raise such claims instead of
apologizing to our Islamic establishment and people."
Iran has refused President Obama's demands that it return the drone.
[Image Source: Matt Ortega/Flickr]
Instead, Iran is filing a
complaint with the United Nations Security Council, stating, "My
government emphasizes that this blatant and unprovoked air violation by the
United States government is tantamount to an act of hostility against the
Islamic Republic of Iran in clear contravention of international law, in
particular, the basic tenets of the United Nations Charter."
Despite that, Defense Secretary Leon
Panetta told Fox News that the U.S. would "absolutely"
continue to fly drones in the region. The implied message -- but one that
the U.S. military does not officially acknowledge -- is that the hunt for
Iranian nuclear weapons activity will continue.
If confirmed, Iran's new drone downing
capabilities are a concern. Currently there's no real secure replacement
for GPS satellites -- though China has done pioneering work in creating a
state-run GPS network with an encrypted channel.. However, U.S. military
suppliers could solve this issue by resorting to more advanced software.
For example a drone could be programmed to:
Store
GPS coordinates, starting from launch from a "friendly" location and
recognize internally large changes to the GPS.
Store
a "friendly" air-space return path using the GPS history and known
routes. This could allow a drone to escape in a case of jamming like this
one, and would prevent the enemy from trying a more slow and subtle modification
of GPS coordinates on a jammed drone.
The new "Avenger" drone from
General Atomics will soon be deployed to the region. It's capable of
holding a 2,000 lb. missile on attack missions.
Iran recently developed bomber UAVs of
its own, though they are believed to be human-controlled designs, which trail
the U.S.'s sophisticated UAVs, which are capable of autonomous flight, thanks
to their advanced artificial intelligence.
V. Iran Threatens Afghanistan, Afghanistan Tells it to Leave it Out of U.S. Mess
Tensions rose on Thursday when Iran
warned its neighbor Afghanistan that it would consider any further drones
detected launching from U.S. bases in Afghanistan a "hostile act" by
the Afghanis. Iran's foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi comments, "We
have called on the Afghan government to seriously pursue the case, and under no
circumstances let such events happen again, as such events will be regarded as
unfriendly."
It's hard to know exactly what Iran
could do in response, given the U.S.'s support for the Afghani government.
The suggestion was enough, though, to
rattle Afghani President Hamid Kharzai, who claimed not to know about the
drone, stating, "Afghanistan was not aware that the drone had gone or
malfunctioned in Iran."
Hamid Kharzai told Iran that he wants their nations to be friends and to
leave them out of its issues with the U.S. [Image Source: CNN]
He added, "Afghanistan would not
want to be involved in any - how should I put it, not antagonism, adversarial
relations between Iran and the United States. Afghanistan wishes that they be
friends and Afghanistan's sovereignty and territorial integrity and soil is not
used one against the other."
Afghanistan currently gets much of its
domestic goods from Iran, a Middle Eastern manufacturing powerhouse. A
trade blockade would, of course, hurt debt-plagued Iran, but it's not entirely
impossible that the nation's leadership could resort to such a mutually
destructive move out of spite.
VI. Hostilities Between Iran and U.S. Continue
Iran, Israel, and the U.S. continue to
be locked in a feud over Iran's reportedly nuclear weapons development.
The U.S. claims their evidence indicates Iran is secretly building bombs.
Iran claims its nuclear weapons activities are peaceful and solely for
power purposes.
In addition to allegations of spying,
Iran has publicly accused the U.S. and Israel of direct sabotage to its nuclear
effort. They point to the sophisticated "Stuxnet" worm, which
specifically targeted Iran's nuclear power facilities, with the goal of
sabotaging refining centrifuges. There have also been reported
assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and unexplained explosions at
Iranian factories/nuclear facilities. Again, the Iranians point to U.S.
and Israeli intelligence as the perpetrators of these incidents.
While Iran has never officially gone to
war with the U.S. or its allies, although it did wage a war with Saddam
Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s, a war in which the U.S. government was exposed to
be funneling weapons and expertise to Iraq, weapons that would be turned
against the U.S. in later conflicts. The U.S. support of Iraq generated
much bitterness and resentment among the Iranian revolutionary movement.
That bitterness has even deeper roots
in the U.S. support for The Shah (Persian for "king") who, together
with his father had ruled Iran for 54 years with U.S. support. While the
U.S. support helped modernize Iran, his policy of crushing dissidents and his
imprisonment of Shiite religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini create
pent-up hatred towards the monarch, animosity that exploded in the Iranian
revolution of 1978.
That revolution installed a theocratic
government much of the kind that some Christian fundamentalists have called for
here in the U.S. -- in which the state had a religion of choice, but
(supposedly) offers freedom of religion via legislative protections for
religious minorities.
Some prominent America politicians such
as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) have called for the U.S. legal system to
recognize the U.S. as a Christian theocracy [source]. Sen. McCain
emphasizes "tolerance", but suggests that he would be uncomfortable
with allowing a Muslim to be President of the United States.
Likewise Iran, in the 1980s went through a period of increasing its own
"tolerance" efforts in the 1980s, allowing its Christian and Jewish
minorities to hold token political positions, albeit barring them from top
positions of federal power.
Despite the similar fundamental
governing philosophies between "conservative" evangelicals in the
U.S. and Iranian fundamentalists, the U.S. evangelical movement have led some
of the harshest criticism of Iran, though curiously going light on U.S. ally
Saudi Arabia, a nation which practices and preaches an even more theocratic
religious rule.
Iran hasn't exactly done its best to
win friends among moderates in the U.S., though. It's been accused of
funneling weapons to guerillas in the 1982 and 2006 conflicts between Lebanon
and the U.S.-backed Israel.
The U.S. fears -- and perhaps rightly
so -- that a nuclear armed Iran could lead to catastrophic destruction of its
ally Israel and U.S. military bases in the Middle East. They also fear
the nation could threaten the stability of secular democracies in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Pakistan, funneling support to religious insurgents.
Israel remains more non-chalant,
claiming it can shoot down any Iranian nukes that come its way. Israel
and Iran are currently engage in a cyberwar.
The Islamic republic is a puzzle for
the Western world, and its neighbors to deal with in coming years. Iran,
despite economic problems and foreign economic sanctions continues to grow.
It recently passed the 1 million market in yearly automobile production,
making it the top domestic producer of cars in the Middle East. Iran has
the benefit of holding the world's second richest natural gas reserves and
third richest oil reserves.
In 2009 Iran launched its first
satellite into space.
Iran is a growing power in terms of education and technology, making its
political and military clashes with the U.S., all the more problematic.
It also claimed to have 3.5 million
college students enrolled in 2008 a 4.4
percent enrollment rate which compares approaches U.S. enrollment rates. The
U.S. reported in 2009 20.4 million college students enrolled, roughly a 6.7 %
per capita enrollment rate. While Iranian propaganda makes it hard to
tell whether these numbers are entirely accurate, Iran does appear to have
higher college education rates that many of its Middle Eastern peers.
Sources:
Christian Science Monitor, ETH Zurich, MSNBC, Fox News
*********************************
See
Photos That Iran Released Of Drone It Made From Stolen U.S. Drone
by
Staff Writer 9 · October 3, 2016
http://americanmilitarynews.com/2016/10/see-photos
-that-iran-released-of-drone-it-made-from-stolen-u-s-drone/
Iranian State Run media reported Saturday
that the country’s Revolutionary Guard has created a drone almost identical to
one belonging to the United States that they captured five years ago. The Tasnim News Agency announced that the
“Saegheh” attack drone is incredibly similar to the RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone
Iran claims to have shot down half a decade ago.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has also
claimed to have recovered three American ScanEagle drones, which
are long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles built by Insitu, a Boeing
subsidiary.
Back in December 2011, Iran claimed to have
shot down the CIA’s spy drone and corroborated their claim by
broadcasting footage of the acquired aircraft. Last year, the Iran claimed they
had successfully tested a replica of the device calling it the “Saegheh” which
translates to “Thunderbolt”. According to Iran’s state-run Press TV, the
long-range drone can hold four precision-guarded bombs, but it did
not report exact figures for the drone’s range.
Along with the news that Iran successfully
replicated the RQ-170, Tasnim reported that the Guard also recently captured an
American-made MQ-1C, which is a medium-altitude, long-endurance unmanned
aircraft system.
***********************
Iranian
Drones Now Regular Nuisance for Carrier in Persian Gulf
Military.com
ABOARD THE USS GEORGE H. W. BUSH, Persian
Gulf -- Visits from Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles designed for surveillance
have become commonplace here, where the Bush and ships from its strike group
patrol and launch airstrikes on Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria.
While small Iranian vessels continue to
approach the carrier and harass U.S. ships elsewhere in the region, the spy
drones appear more regularly, said Capt. Will Pennington, commanding officer of
the Bush.
"That is a capability that the entire
world is getting, and Iran is no different," he told Military.com in an
interview. "These aren't small, radio-controlled drones. They're
reconnaissance."
The first recent reported incident in which
Iran flew a drone over a U.S. carrier came in January 2016, when an unarmed
reconnaissance UAV approached the Harry S. Truman and a French carrier, the
Charles DeGaulle. In that incident, a Navy MH-60 helicopter was launched to
investigate, ultimately determining that the unmanned aircraft posed no threat,
according to reports.
Now, Pennington said, the Bush detects nearby
Iranian drones nearly every day, and crew members have a variety of methods at
their disposal to thwart them -- and other episodes of Iranian harassment --
and protect the ship.
"We almost always have a substantial
heads-up," Pennington said. "And then we have a series of procedures
that we train to that gradually, or not gradually, escalates our defensive
position and our level of readiness."
In addition to helicopters that can take to
the air for the ship's defense, the carrier can get support from its escort
ships, including the Danish frigate Peter Willemoes, which has been deployed
with the carrier strike group since January. There are also built-in defense
systems native to the carrier, Pennington said.
When the carrier transited through the Strait
of Hormuz and entered the Gulf in late March with four ships from its strike
group, it was met with naked hostility in the form of two waves of Iranian
fast-attack boats. The crews could be seen manning and arming the weapons
aboard, Pennington said. In that case, the Bush deployed helicopters to hover
over the boats, and the encounter ended without a military confrontation.
Since arriving in the Gulf, the carrier's
encounters with Iranian boats and UAVs have been less dramatic. Because the
ship is patrolling international waters, Iranian vessels are within their
rights to operate nearby. Encounters in the region have so far been
professional.
But Pennington and carrier leadership remain
wary.
Just days ago, Pennington said, the carrier
was approached by "a number" of Iranian ships, and their intentions
did not appear clear. So the ship escalated its defensive posture, launching
helicopters until the strike group was reassured that the ships were not
threatening.
There's a reason even seemingly minor
encounters cause the ship to raise its defenses, he said.
"We can't allow ourselves to be a boiled
frog," Pennington explained, referring to an anecdote in which a frog is placed
in cold water which is then slowly heated until the frog dies.
"We have to treat each day as an open
mind, and while it's important to categorize patterns, any day could be the
day," he said. "It's important to understand what's routine, but you
can't afford to be lackadaisical. You've got to respect the capability that is
resident in a country that has demonstrated they're willing to support and
participate in bad behavior."
That said, it would likely take much more
provocation before the carrier would use military force to end one of the
almost-daily drone encounters.
"We always have the inherent right of
self-defense. I can tell you we are not in a position nor are we directed to
absorb the first shot," Pennington said. "But [to take action] pre-emptively,
it would take a dramatic change in the strategic environment."
--
Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter
at@HopeSeck