INSURGENTS in Iraq used a $26 piece of widely available software to help them hack into the video pictures being beamed down from unmanned US spy drones. The US military only discovered this when they found one of these recordings on a laptop seized during a raid on an insurgent hideout.
Incredibly, when drones were first being introduced, senior officers in the Pentagon did not think it necessary to encrypt the video signals they sent back to their ground control. Since the alarming discovery that they had, in fact, been hacked, the US military has introduced encryption for the transmissions.
There is a clear arrogance demonstrated here in the assumption that opponents in less advanced countries would be incapable of compromising the very latest in US high technology. Yet as has been demonstrated time and again, it only takes a bright kid with an ordinary computer and time on his hands to hack into all sorts of high-security systems, including those of the Pentagon itself. How much more potent, therefore, are any hacking efforts sponsored by governments or wealthy organizations that are prepared to pay hackers handsomely and buy them any piece of powerful hardware that they require?
The Russians have already demonstrated the power of such quasi-official hacking when they brought the Internet to a grinding halt in Latvia by bombarding every Latvian website in service-denial attacks. Most recently this week, Iranian government supporters brought down the social networking site Twitter for two hours and broke into and changed a website run by opponents of the government.
The people who did this styled themselves the “Iranian Cyber Army”. This grandiloquent name is not as risible as it might at first seem. There really are cyber armies out there, who because of the resources behind them, now pose a far greater threat than the lonely computer nerd beavering away in his bedroom. Indeed, the Russian and Iranian cyber-attacks should be viewed as mere ranging shots in what will surely one day erupt into a complex, ugly and hugely disruptive conflict.
Despite the shortsightedness over the security of their drones, the Americans appreciate this as well as anyone. One of the early acts of the Obama administration was the appointment of a cyber czar to coordinate the security of US computer systems. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has created a Cyber Command. It would be naïve to imagine that its battle plan is purely defensive.
At some point in a future international crisis, it too will be aiming to unleash a wide array of cyber weapons that will paralyze or alter the Internet communications of a rival state. Indeed the harder it works to figure out how to do this, the better it will understand the ever-evolving threat that the US itself faces.
Unfortunately, for ordinary citizens, businesses, banks, hospitals and all other organizations that now rely so heavily on the Internet, being caught in a full-on cyber barrage could be extremely serious. But is anyone yet thinking seriously about mitigating this risk?
