US Sentinel Drone Fooled Into Landing With GPS Spoofing 647
McGruber writes "Following up on the earlier Slashdot story, the Christian Science Monitor now reports that GPS spoofing was used to get the RQ-170 Sentinel Drone to land in Iran. According to an Iranian engineer quoted in the article, 'By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain.' Apparently, once it loses its brain, the bird relies on GPS signals to get home. By spoofing GPS, Iranian engineers were able to get the drone to 'land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications.'"
Somewhere in the engineering process (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Somewhere in the engineering process (Score:4, Funny)
Re:nice hack (Score:5, Funny)
What can solve this problem? (Score:3, Funny)
A man in the pilot seat.
GPS spoofing (Score:5, Funny)
Those GPS spoofers got to Slashdot too, apparantly, fooling the editors into thinking that the drone landed in Iraq.
i can see the heads of state and generals now... (Score:5, Funny)
"What, our multimillion dollar RC aeroplane with super special awesome shooty bits on it got STOLEN? I thought those people were a bunch of camel riding nomads that didn't even have electricity! How did they spoof our GPS and jam our command and control feeds!?"
"Well sir, yes, the drone was actually stolen and not shot down. As for their offensive technical abilities sir, they *are* developing nuclear weapons, and most of their population is not comprised of nomadic camel riders, sir."
"Are you mockin' me son?! I've served in this god-blessed nation's armed forces muh entire life! And now you intend to tell me, that some turban wearin camel humpers not only defeated state of the art tactical surveylance like it was child's play, and didn't knock it down with rocks or summat', but that their so called nuclear program is actually viable, AND that my assessment of their "society" is plain and simply 'wrong'?!"
"No sir, I am not mocking you sir, but the rest of what you said is true sir."
"Get out of here private! I don't know who assigned you to technical liason, but they obviously picked a mo-ron. If I could demote you any lower than private, rest assured the orders would go through expediently!"
[I am probably (hopefully) wrong about this caricature, but this sure looks like how things are being run.]
Re:The truth slowly comes out (Score:5, Funny)
The more important aspect of the truth that's slowly leaking out is that U.S. officials are finally admitting [cnn.com] that it was on a spy mission inside Iran and dropping that ridiculous cover story that it was just flying around Afghanistan and accidentally may have strayed into Iran (oopsy, whoopsy, did we cross your border?!?).
Actually the drone was just going for a hike along the border. There's some wonderful scenery in that area. It had no idea it had strayed across the line into Iran until the Iranians captured it. It certainly was not doing any spying and hopes to be released soon so it can return to its journalism career.
Re:The truth slowly comes out (Score:5, Funny)