Military Video Feed Hacking

If you haven't been paying attention to the Military Tech. blogs lately you may have missed The Wall Street Journal scoop of insurgents hacking US video feeds from surveillance drones. Unencrypted transmissions in the ROVER system leads to eavesdropping of the video feeds from Predator and Reaper drones.

According to WSJ sources, back in 2008 insurgent laptop(s) were recovered with files containing drone feeds and a commonly obtainable software package called Skygrabber. Mix in some off-the-shelf electronics and you have your own portable ELINT station.

Initially DoD representatives tried to downplay the incident stating that the video feeds did not contain classified information of use to the individuals. A PDF posted to the Full Disclosure mailing list indicated that at least GPS coordinates were contained as Metadata in the video feeds.



(side note: adding in the recent problems the TSA has had with PDF's and it's starting to look like nobody at the defense departments understands this whole "Metadata" thing...)

Plugging in the coordinates from the preceding image you get a location near the border of Nogales Mexico, a popular location for border patrol drone operations. Seems confidential enough to me...