The Wall Street Journal has a bomb shell of s story.

It appears that insurgents in Afghanistan have hacked into the video feeds of US drones:

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.

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.

(link to SkyGrapper software mine)

I am surprised by this. Not so much by the idea that anyone in a situation to be surveilled and attacked by the US might attempt to use SIGINT to defend themselves, that it just basic common sense, but by the fact that the US military has been using an unencrypted feed to transmit data.

And, of course, we have the accusation that it was Iran who actually hacked the feeds, or developed the method to hack the feeds, because, much like in the case of the the Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFP) used by insurgents in Iraq, it is claimed that only the Iranians have the technical know-how to use such a system.

Of course, in the case of the EFPs, this accusation relied on a number of lies, in particular the idea that EFP construction was so technically challenging that only the Iranians could do it, despite the fact that the IRA was using EFPs in Ireland over 30 years ago, and that they actually discovered workshops where IEDs were manufactured…………It turns out all you need to make an EFP is a simple lathe and some copper.

The idea that once someone discovered the video feeds were unencrypted, and my guess would be that this has been known since the Kosovo campaign, because the Serbs were typically all over this kind of stuff.

In any case, the military is now claiming that this breach has been fixed, implying that encryption has been added.

I’m wondering what took so long. The satellite TV providers have been encrypting their signals with minimal computational overhead for decades.

Of course, I have an improvement on this idea, and it involves lesbian pr0n. (You were wondering when we would be getting to the pr0n, weren’t you)

In addition to using encryption, the video feed should use steganography to embed the signal inside an unencrypted non-tactical video feed.

The unencrypted video should be lesbian pr0n,^* because the then the insurgents would in order to extract the true signal, be forced to watch nekkid women (Oh my God, tits!) deriving sexual satisfaction (Oh my God, female orgasm!) without benefit of a penis (Oh my God…………You get the idea), and it just screws with their heads (both upper and lower).

One of the reasons for the pr0n,^† is because any relatively competent state actor would be able to decrypt a video feed in a relatively short period of time by gang tackling the signal with a video game based massively parallel super-computer.

^*It was actually Bill Volk who made the suggestion.
^†Beside the fact that I am a smart ass.