Iraqi Hackers Create U.S. Drone Security Breach

Insurgents Hack U.S. 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.

U.S. officials say there is no evidence that militants were able to take control of the drones or otherwise interfere with their flights. Still, the intercepts could give America's enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under U.S. surveillance.

The drone intercepts mark the emergence of a shadow cyber war within the U.S.-led conflicts overseas. They also point to a potentially serious vulnerability in Washington's growing network of unmanned drones, which have become the American weapon of choice in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Obama administration has come to rely heavily on the unmanned drones because they allow the U.S. to safely monitor and stalk insurgent targets in areas where sending American troops would be either politically untenable or too risky.

The stolen video feeds also indicate that U.S. adversaries continue to find simple ways of counteracting sophisticated American military technologies.

U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered the problem late last year when they apprehended a Shiite militant whose laptop contained files of intercepted drone video feeds. In July, the U.S. military found pirated drone video feeds on other militant laptops, leading some officials to conclude that militant groups trained and funded by Iran were regularly intercepting feeds.

In the summer 2009 incident, the military found "days and days and hours and hours of proof" that the feeds were being intercepted and shared with multiple extremist groups, the person said. "It is part of their kit now."

A senior defense official said that James Clapper, the Pentagon's intelligence chief, assessed the Iraq intercepts at the direction of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and concluded they represented a shortcoming to the security of the drone network.

"There did appear to be a vulnerability," the defense official said. "There's been no harm done to troops or missions compromised as a result of it, but there's an issue that we can take care of and we're doing so."

Senior military and intelligence officials said the U.S. was working to encrypt all of its drone video feeds from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but said it wasn't yet clear if the problem had been completely resolved.

Some of the most detailed evidence of intercepted feeds has been discovered in Iraq, but adversaries have also intercepted drone video feeds in Afghanistan, according to people briefed on the matter. These intercept techniques could be employed in other locations where the U.S. is using pilotless planes, such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, they said.

The Pentagon is deploying record numbers of drones to Afghanistan as part of the Obama administration's troop surge there. Lt. Gen. David Deptula, who oversees the Air Force's unmanned aviation program, said some of the drones would employ a sophisticated new camera system called "Gorgon Stare," which allows a single aerial vehicle to transmit back at least 10 separate video feeds simultaneously.

Gen. Deptula, speaking to reporters Wednesday, said there were inherent risks to using drones since they are remotely controlled and need to send and receive video and other data over great distances. "Those kinds of things are subject to listening and exploitation," he said, adding the military was trying to solve the problems by better encrypting the drones' feeds.

The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said.

Last December, U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered copies of Predator drone feeds on a laptop belonging to a Shiite militant, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter. "There was evidence this was not a one-time deal," this person said. The U.S. accuses Iran of providing weapons, money and training to Shiite fighters in Iraq, a charge that Tehran has long denied.

The militants use programs such as SkyGrabber, from Russian company SkySoftware. Andrew Solonikov, one of the software's developers, said he was unaware that his software could be used to intercept drone feeds. "It was developed to intercept music, photos, video, programs and other content that other users download from the Internet -- no military data or other commercial data, only free legal content," he said by email from Russia.

Officials stepped up efforts to prevent insurgents from intercepting video feeds after the July incident. The difficulty, officials said, is that adding encryption to a network that is more than a decade old involves more than placing a new piece of equipment on individual drones. Instead, many components of the network linking the drones to their operators in the U.S., Afghanistan or Pakistan have to be upgraded to handle the changes. Additional concerns remain about the vulnerability of the communications signals to electronic jamming, though there's no evidence that has occurred, said people familiar with reports on the matter.

Predator drones are built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. of San Diego. Some of its communications technology is proprietary, so widely used encryption systems aren't readily compatible, said people familiar with the matter.

In an email, a spokeswoman said that for security reasons, the company couldn't comment on "specific data link capabilities and limitations."

Fixing the security gap would have caused delays, according to current and former military officials. It would have added to the Predator's price. Some officials worried that adding encryption would make it harder to quickly share time-sensitive data within the U.S. military, and with allies.

"There's a balance between pragmatics and sophistication," said Mike Wynne, Air Force Secretary from 2005 to 2008.

The Air Force has staked its future on unmanned aerial vehicles. Drones account for 36% of the planes in the service's proposed 2010 budget.

Today, the Air Force is buying hundreds of Reaper drones, a newer model, whose video feeds could be intercepted in much the same way as with the Predators, according to people familiar with the matter. A Reaper costs between $10 million and $12 million each and is faster and better armed than the Predator. General Atomics expects the Air Force to buy as many as 375 Reapers.



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Taliban's Power Increases, Surpasses Al-Qaida...Plans To Destroy U.S.

America awaits Pres. Obama's decision on the Afghan War crisis.

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Video appears to show militants with U.S. ammo. Television footage shows insurgents handling what appears to be U.S. ammunition in eastern Afghanistan. Msnbc.com's Dara Brown reports.

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In Afghanistan, Taliban surpasses al-Qaida


As violence rises in Afghanistan, the power balance between insurgent groups has shifted, with a weakened al-Qaeda relying increasingly on the emboldened Taliban for protection and the manpower to carry out deadly attacks, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials.

The ascendancy of the Taliban and the relative decline of al-Qaeda have broad implications for the Obama administration as it seeks to define its enemy in Afghanistan and debates deploying tens of thousands of additional troops.

Although the war in Afghanistan began as a response to al-Qaeda terrorism, there are perhaps fewer than 100 members of the group left in the country, according to a senior U.S. military intelligence official in Kabul who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The official estimated that there are 300 al-Qaeda members in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where the group is based, compared with tens of thousands of Taliban insurgents on either side of the border.

Yet officials and observers here differ over whether the inversion of the groups' traditional power dynamic has led to better or worse relations. Indeed, it may be bringing al-Qaeda closer to certain Taliban factions -- most notably, forces loyal to former Taliban cabinet minister Jalaluddin Haqqani -- and driving it apart from others, including leader Mohammad Omar's Pakistan-based group. The shifting alliances, analysts say, could have significant bearing on where the U.S. military chooses to focus its firepower.

Although President Obama has said the United States must remain in Afghanistan because a Taliban victory here would mean a rapid proliferation of al-Qaeda fighters as they return to their pre-2001 sanctuary, Omar's faction seems to have distanced itself from al-Qaeda in recent months.

The shift appears to reflect Omar's growing confidence that his group can operate on its own, without al-Qaeda as its patron. "The Taliban have got the expertise, they have got the resources, they have got the momentum," said Richard Barrett, coordinator of the U.N. Taliban and al-Qaeda Monitoring Team.

The Taliban and al-Qaeda have long enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. The Taliban, composed primarily of ethnic Pashtuns from Afghanistan and Pakistan, has offered haven to the Arab-led al-Qaeda in exchange for money, weapons and training. When Omar ruled nearly all of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, he sheltered al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and refused to turn him over to the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan forced Omar and bin Laden to flee to Pakistan.

Agendas diverge

Omar's mission is to force U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan and to recapture the country. His group is particularly active in attacking U.S. troops in southern Afghanistan, his home base.

This year, Omar's military committee published a rule book for followers, calling on them to protect the population and avoid civilian casualties -- much like U.S. counterinsurgency principles. He has railed against the corruption of President Hamid Karzai's government, an issue that resonates with Afghans. He has also solicited support from other Muslim countries. But al-Qaeda's agenda of global holy war and taste for mass-casualty attacks, no matter how many Muslim civilians are killed, complicate that goal.

In a February interview with al-Samoud magazine, Taliban political committee leader Agha Jan Mutassim praised the Saudi Arabian government, called for Muslim unity and said the Taliban "respects all different Islamic schools and branches without any discrimination" in Afghanistan.

Such positions may put Omar's Taliban at odds with al-Qaeda's extremist Sunni agenda of overthrowing what it sees as corrupt Muslim governments and targeting Shiites. Analysts said that Omar, who leads a council of Taliban commanders based in or around the Pakistani city of Quetta, wants such countries as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan to recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government if it regains power and that he has little interest in fomenting war elsewhere.

"We assure all countries that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as a responsible force, will not extend its hand to cause jeopardy to others," Omar said in a written statement in September.

The messages from the Taliban leadership since the spring amount to something of a "revolution," said Wahid Mujda, a political analyst who was a Foreign Ministry official under the Taliban government. "Al-Qaeda's path is now different from the Taliban's path, and they are growing more separated."

Other, closer ties

Although that may be true of Omar's faction, observers here say that other segments of the Taliban have become more closely entwined with al-Qaeda than ever.

The Haqqani-led faction, which is blamed for many of the deadliest attacks on U.S. troops in eastern Afghanistan, works so closely with al-Qaeda that distinctions between the groups may be irrelevant, officials said.

In the lawless border town of Miran Shah in Pakistan's North Waziristan region, where insurgents hold sway and experience little interference from the Pakistani army, Haqqani's Taliban works side by side with al-Qaeda. Haqqani developed close ties with Arab fighters during the war against the Soviets in the 1980s, during which he received funding from the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency. One of his wives is Arab. When bin Laden fled the U.S. invasion in 2001, he took refuge with Haqqani in a safe house between the Afghan city of Khost and Miran Shah, according to Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid.

Haqqani's network, which experts say maintains links with Pakistani authorities, fights in eastern Afghanistan. But the group is also blamed for much of the violence in Kabul. After an attack on a U.N. guesthouse last month that killed eight people, Afghan officials said Haqqani's fighters planned the assault with the help of an al-Qaeda operative.

On the battlefield, insurgents from al-Qaeda and a broad spectrum of Taliban factions still communicate and coordinate attacks, officials said. United by a common enemy, they share explosives and use the same suicide-bomber networks. A foreign fighter who travels to the Pakistani tribal lands to join al-Qaeda may end up working with the Taliban.

"Al-Qaeda is the teacher of the Taliban. They're still very close partners," said Maj. Gen. Abdul Manan Farahi, director general of the Afghan Interior Ministry's anti-terrorism department. "It's very clear, the ideological connection they have."

Despite its weakened state, there is little doubt that al-Qaeda remains a potent international force, and there is reason to believe that cooperation with Pakistani Taliban groups is deepening.

As the world's premier terrorist brand, al-Qaeda "still has an iconic value, an emulation value," a senior U.S. military official said.

And yet, Omar's Taliban, at least, may not want to repeat recent history, when his group's loyalty to al-Qaeda spoiled the Taliban's opportunity to defeat rival Afghan factions and rule the entire country.

"If you debrief senior Taliban guys, they'll tell you that al-Qaeda stole the victory, because they were going to win prior to the World Trade Center attacks," the U.S. military intelligence official said. "The more they connect themselves to al-Qaeda, the less the population's going to welcome them back."



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Afghan Insurgents Immediately Begin Attacks On U.S. Troops...Soldiers Face Extremely Dangerous Mission

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Insurgents have captured an American soldier in eastern Afghanistan, the U.S. military said Thursday.

Spokeswoman Capt. Elizabeth Mathias said the soldier went missing on Tuesday.

"We are using all of our resources to find him and provide for his safe return," Mathias said

Mathias said the missing GI's identity was not being released to "protect the soldier's well-being."

There were conflicting reports about details of the soldier's disappearance.

An Afghan police official said the soldier went missing in the Mullakheil area of the eastern Paktika province. Gen. Nabi Mullakheil said there is an American base in the area.

Earlier, NBC News reported that the Taliban claimed to have captured three U.S. soldiers in the eastern province of Khost. The claim could not be verified.

Khost and Paktika are adjacent to each other and share a border with Pakistan.

NBC News reported that a representative of the Taliban contacted the U.S. military in Afghanistan and provided details of the soldier's identity.

The enlisted soldier's family has been notified, NBC News reported.

A myriad of insurgent groups operate in eastern Afghanistan, and the Taliban is only one of them.

The news broke as thousands of U.S. Marines launched a major anti-Taliban offensive in southern Afghanistan. The missing soldier was not part of that operation.

Thousands of U.S. Marines and hundreds of Afghan troops poured into Taliban-infested villages with armor and helicopters in the first major operation under President Barack Obama's strategy to stabilize the country.

The offensive started shortly after 1 a.m. local time in Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold and the world's largest opium poppy producing area. The goal is to clear insurgents from the hotly contested region before the nation's Aug. 20 presidential election.


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