Good point that.
I was wondering how autonomous these craft are. They are not like the Predator, that needs active control to perform its role. They could be programmed to fly a mission and return. External control could be limited to commands that modify the mission. However we don’t and probably never will know.
COMPUTER VIRUSES DON’T WORK THAT WAY!
Good night.
But Trojans can.:dubious:
No they cannot. Malicious software is still software. It must run like any other application to do anything. More importantly, even if one could for some bizare reason load data onto the UAV there’s no reason it would be able to launch an application like a PC would.
In order to infect the UAV Iran would have to;
[ol]
[li]Already know the architecture of the device in question; unlikely.[/li][li]Be targeting a UAV which (for no apparent reason) was able to run on software which could be changed like a PC’s could (which makes no sense, given that all devices with microprocessors, military hardware included, run code from read only mass produced chips for so many reasons I won’t bother listing them); well, maybe one of their contractors was high.[/li][li]Have a way to upload the virus and make the UAV run it (which is a bit like sending someone a letter with instructions and making them follow it. With someone else reading their mail); not going to happen.[/li][/ol]
In other words, trying to infect the UAV with a virus would be about as possible as changing the filling of a freshly baked pie.
Blame software programmers’ stupidity.
Hardware or software engineers are good at coming up with ways to calculate solutions, but in all else they’re incompetent and stupid.
That’s why Apple has such a strong market, by the way… they put the UI design ahead of the engineering know-how when designing gadgets.
I think the issue with remote destruction has been well addressed previously. Given that unless there is additional physical componentry - up to and including explosives - added to the hardware design of the device there is no known mechanism by which software can damage the hardware, the idea that this is a software problem is more than a little naive. We also don’t know what self destruct there was present. All we have seen is a video of the upper half of the hull of the craft, apparently intact, a week after the craft was lost. It could easily be a fibreglass mockup built after the crashed drone was recovered, displayed for the purpose of annoying the US. Something the Iranians would no doubt delight in doing.
Further, it ignores the manner in which systems are actually designed and built. Software engineers are not given a simple task to “go write a remote control system”. Especially not for a military system. There will be a phone-book thick set of requirements that details in very precise ways exactly what is expected of every part of the drone, and for software components these will be very very detailed. Including excruciatingly precise process by which the software is written and tested. Further, these requirements will be checked off as a part of contract fulfilment. If the arm of the defence department that specified the drone considered that a self destruct capability was worth the added risk, they would have specified it. And there would have been another phone-book thick set of documentation that precisely detailed how that capability requirement had been met.
Everything about the drone’s specification, is a compromise of risk. For a sensitive device like this the risk that one is eventually lost and falls into the hands of another government will have been weighted up. It seems likely that these drones were specified with the expectation that one would eventually be lost. Although probably with the expectation that it would crash. So the risks are weighted up carefully. The risk of adding a dangerous self destruct capability that is probably just as likely to kill one of your ground crew as it is to protect any valuable knowledge about the craft is likely to be viewed dimly.
So to the military, the loss of sensitive technology is less important than the safety of the ground crew? That seems oddly humane.
Instead of an on-board bomb, why not just program the flight control to have the thing crash after a high speed dive?
The picture that the Iranians have released looks fake-it looks like they made up a mocked-up copy, perhaps with pieces of the drone.
They are obviously looking to make as much hay with this as they can.
It reminds me of how Kruschev handled the crash of FG Power’s U-2 spyplane-releasing bits and pieces at a time-till they revealed the real prize (the live pilot).
If the Iranians follow this script, we will see much more.
Stay tuned.
Even thought there have been news reports of infected drones for weeks now?
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-12-08/news/30489464_1_creech-air-force-drone-computer-virus
The article does not mention a drone virus. At all. It mentions a pretty ordinary keylogger virus that got into some base PCs. Something that whilst embarrassing is totally removed from the idea of infecting the drone systems. The real world simply does not work like the alien computers in Independence Day.
Connecting the idea of the keylogger virus with commandeering the drones makes about as much sense as claiming that I could take control of your car with a virus on your home PC.
I didn’t read most of the posts besides the OP, so did anyone mention the idea that this was a deliberate disinformation exercise? Certainly the drone could have been destroyed. If the military is even hinting otherwise, it is probably to allay the suspicions of the Iranians. I think it is possible if not likely that at the very least, this was intended to spread some sort of infection such as the stuxnet virus.
The original story in Wired is here:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/virus-hits-drone-fleet/
it claims that the virus was on the actual GCS (ground control station) PC’s which are controlling the drones. The virus was a keylogger, it could have been used to help get access to sensitive information about the control system to a spy.
That intel could then have helped to develop a method of jamming and overriding the drones locally.
Every news story I’ve read in the past three days says that US experts are saying the drone did go down (US military has confirmed this) and that the object the Iranians are displaying is, in fact, that missing drone.
Isn’t it easy to make self erasing computer chips? I know there were programmable chips erased by uv light, they could make some that used visible light. Or exposure to oxygen. Or room temperature or something.
Yes, but when they take a certain panel off, they will see seven segment displays counting down in seconds from ten to zero. 
As the Wired article says, there is an airgap between the GCS computers and the rest of the world. To get the logged data out would require that the next time a disk is attached to the computer the virus knows to load the logged data onto that, and then assumes that there is yet another specially infected computer that that disk will be attached, and that an additional virus will read the data off the disk and then send it to the Iranians. This is not a conventional known keylogger virus, but something specifically crafted for purpose, and would require significant knowledge of base operations to effect. Worse, the virus would have a different signature to any known keyloggers - it would contain significantly different code and be clearly new. From the article it is clear that the virus was identified as a known keylogger. It still isn’t a credible mechanism for access to information related to the drones control.
The presence of the virus is evidence of incomplete security issues, and thus is evidence that their could be another, as yet undetected virus. But the obstacle course of issues that it would need to go through to actually work makes it very hard to believe that this is what occurred.
Personally I suspect that the video is showing a reconstructed drone that is as much fibreglass and filler as real drone.
This assumes that the
Francis Vaughan? Francis Vaughan?
Oh god, they got to him! Everybody get underneath cover, the Drone Lords rule the skies!