May 25, 2013, by Bruce Wallace, 121Contact
President Obama reassures us that drone strikes will be less
common because of legal and moral concerns. They may become obsolete before he
gets a chance to modify the program.
In White Sands, New Mexico, 2012: University of Austin’s
Professor Todd Humphreys and his students put on a demonstration for the
Department of Homeland Security. There was a suspicion that Iran had, the
previous year, downed a U.S. drone by jamming its signals. The experiment was successful.
Humphrey’s team not only jammed the signals to the drone, they were able to
take control of the unmanned vehicle. The process, called spoofing, took only
$1000 worth of equipment. They repeatedly overtook navigational signals going
to the GPS-guided vehicle.
One year later, only 2 days ago, a message on the Ansar
al-Mujahideen forum suggested that jihadists use the simpler method of jamming
the signal.
"The idea is very simple and could be applied with
great success, Allah willing, and this is due to the remoteness of the main
source of the signal - the satellite - and its relative weakness. All we need
to implement this attack is a jamming device for the "GPS"
frequencies, which makes the plane lose control and forces it to land, like
what happened in North Korea when it forced an American drone to land through
jamming".(SITE)
Cyberoam
reported that a recent hack attack “seems to have stolen data from several
companies regarding all aspects of unmanned vehicles (drones) from research to
design to manufacturing of the vehicles and their various subsystems.” We haven’t
heard of anyone publishing detailed plans yet, but a featured article in al-Qaeda’s
Inspire Magazine can’t be far off.
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Spoofing: The process of deception by which an unauthorized
person causes a transmission or message to appear to come from an authorized
user in order to gain privileged access to computer or network resources. IP
spoofing, an integral element of many types of network attacks, involves
creating TCP/IP packets that use false addresses, perhaps stolen from others.