As the headline on FARK.com reads,

Predator drone: $4.5 million. Off the shelf software:  $26. Knowing the Iranians just hacked your high-tech surveillance with a program you can get at Best Buy: priceless.

According to this Wall Street Journal article, Iraqi insurgents have used commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software to “intercept live video feeds from U.S. predator” unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), “potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.” The article reports that –

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.

We have previously written about the emphasis on ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) in the Southwest Asia theater of operations.  In addition, we’ve posted on impact of cyber-warfare on 21^st century military operations.  Thus, it’s disappointing—but not especially surprising—that the Department of Defense would fail to encrypt its video feeds. In the words of one FARK commenter:  “My wireless router should not have better security on it than a Predator Drone.”

An article on Gizmodo.com observes that “If twelve-year-olds can encrypt their torrent downloads, I think it's a reasonably fair expectation for the US military to be able to encrypt mission-critical data transmissions, the insecurity of which could kill people.”

The WSJ article notes that—

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.

Perhaps this is one unforeseen outcome of the “spiral development” acquisition strategy, where military weapons and systems are issued to the battlefield when ready for use, instead of when perfected—thus giving the warfighters better tools right now as opposed to years later. Nonetheless, it is a worrisome problem that points to an inattention, on the part of somebody in the chain of command, to the impacts of the technology in the hands of our adversaries on our own technology.  Let us hope it is a lesson learned at the Pentagon.