Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.In some ways, this is terrible news. Our security is made vulnerable to all and sundry enemies, the US (according to my sources) is way behind in the "cyber-warfare" realm, and no data is totally secure. As evidenced by this man's ongoing saga:Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.
I'd rather the US had much better security, personally, and live in hope that the more dictatorial nations around the world shall forever be plagued by an inability to totally secure their systems. But still--the fact that information in this electronic age is so much harder to hide offers some hope of a more free, more open world.SK: How did you go about trying to find the stuff you were looking for in Nasa, in the Department of Defense?
GM: Unlike the press would have you believe, it wasn't very clever. I searched for blank passwords...SK: Were you the only hacker to make it past the slightly lower-than-expected lines of defence?
GM: Yes, exactly, there were no lines of defence. There was a permanent tenancy of foreign hackers. You could run a command when you were on the machine that showed connections from all over the world, check the IP address to see if it was another military base or whatever, and it wasn't.
The General Accounting Office in America has again published another damning report saying that federal security is very, very poor.
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