Cyberstrike, James Barrington [short story to read .TXT] 📗

US military machine. The headline read: ‘Insurgents hack US drones: $26 software is used to breach key weapons in Iraq; Iranian backing suspected’.

The suggested implications were frightening. If the Iranians genuinely had hacked their way into the control systems of the then $4 million Predator UAVs and were able to redirect the drones to release their missiles and bombs against Western targets, none of the Allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan would ever be safe again.

Fortunately, like most claims of this sort made by the media, the headline was both hysterical and factually inaccurate in almost every single respect. There had been no hack, nor had there been a breach and as far as it could be established the Iranians weren’t involved in any way, though the Russians were, albeit indirectly. In fact, the only thing the headline actually got right was the price of the software involved: it cost $26 in the shady backstreet black markets of Baghdad.

What had actually happened was that an insurgent with a fair degree of technical know-how had obtained a piece of software produced in Russia called SkyGrabber, a program that was not designed to assist hackers in any way or to be used by them. In fact, it’s specifically intended to allow users to download televised football matches and movies and other stuff from satellite television channels without the inconvenience and expense of actually paying for them.

The insurgent loaded the software onto a computer, hitched the computer to a satellite dish and then began scanning the skies until he locked into a stream of video data being transmitted by a Predator drone. Unlike the transmissions and responses used in controlling the UAV, the video feeds from its cameras were not encrypted, so all that had actually happened was that an unauthorised individual had managed to log on to and record a transmission he wasn’t supposed to see.

So no breach, no hack and no Iranian involvement. All good news.

Unfortunately, almost exactly two years later the Iranians certainly did become involved with an American drone.

On 4 December 2011 American CIA operators lost contact with a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel unarmed UAV, allegedly while over the airspace of Afghanistan though the Iranians claimed they had detected it some 140 miles inside their borders. The following day the Iranian government announced that its cyber warfare unit located in north-eastern Iran at Kashmar had taken control of the drone and had successfully landed it.

Western news sources initially stated that the Sentinel had been shot down, but this was obviously not the case as the Iranians quickly displayed the apparently intact UAV: if it had been hit by a missile or gunfire and had then crashed there would have been little left to put on show. Clearly, the Iranians had somehow taken control of the drone and managed to make it do a soft landing. The obvious question was how?

According to an unidentified Iranian engineer, they had successfully jammed both the satellite and ground-based control signals and then carried out a GPS spoofing attack that sent incorrect GPS data into the UAV’s navigation system. This data suggested to the drone’s navigation system that it was near its home base in Afghanistan and instructed it to land. The obvious problem with this suggestion is that the primary navigation aid on almost all of America’s manned and unmanned military vehicles, including the TLAM (Tomahawk Land Attack Missile), the MQ-1 Predator, the MQ-9 Reaper and the RQ-170, isn’t GPS but inertial navigation. This is the case because GPS signal jamming and spoofing is a fairly simple technique to employ, whereas the INS, the inertial navigation system, is internal to the craft and cannot be compromised.

But however they had done it, it was obvious that the Iranians had somehow managed to establish control over the Lockheed Martin drone at least to the extent necessary to persuade it do to a soft landing. Or soft-ish, anyway. If they did manage to feed incorrect GPS data into its system and had been able to generate a landing instruction, the drone’s controlling software would have assumed that it was landing on its home-base runway rather than some anonymous stretch of desert near Kashmar. There were some suggestions that the drone had suffered some damage, presumably on landing, which the Iranians had hastily patched up before putting it on display.

What is beyond dispute is that the Iranian government did take possession of the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel, a fact unofficially acknowledged by the Americans on 6 December 2011. A somewhat optimistic request for the return of the drone by President Obama was haughtily rebuffed by the Iranian government, along with a complaint to the UN Security Council about the American violation of Iranian airspace by the UAV.

Having obtained the intact or largely intact and undamaged RQ-170, the Iranians then set about reverse engineering it to produce their own version. This was shown on Iranian television in May 2014 but was widely dismissed by Western observers as a mock-up rather than a working UAV. This was followed in November 2014 by claims by the Iranians that it had made a successful test flight and in September 2016 a statement that a UAV called Sa’egheh had entered service with the Iranian military.

Critics and disbelievers of these claims were silenced in February 2018 when Israeli forces shot down a Sa’egheh UAV. Examination of the drone showed conclusively that it was primarily derived from the RQ-170 UAV and that the design was both advanced and embodied Western technology.

Non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapon (NNEMP)

Known as an explosively pumped flux compression generator bomb, or more commonly as a non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse or NNEMP, or even just as an E-bomb, the weapon had its roots in a suggestion by theoretical physicist Arthur Compton back in 1925. Compton believed that the high energy photons generated by electromagnetic energy would be capable of freeing electrons from lighter elements, those with low atomic numbers, and that those freed electrons could then interact with the Earth’s magnetic field.