In which AT&T learns about Moore's Law, and insurgents spy on spy drones

[unixronin]

Robert Cringely talks about gag orders from Apple, and the day AT&T learned about Moore's Law.  A short but interesting read, in several ways.  (Ever heard of the PortalPlayer iPod?  ...No, I didn't think so.)

In other news, SecurityWire reports that despite a lack of visible activity, Conficker is still quietly out there doing its thing.  The Conficker botnet is currently estimated at around 7 million machines.  Mikko Hyppönen of F-Secure Corp says that due to the botnet's size and the way it is being monitored, "it would be difficult for anyone to use it to make money or break it up and rent portions out without being detected".

"Conficker was unique in many ways and the biggest mystery around Conficker is why?" Hyppönen said.  "The most logical explanation is that Conficker got too big and too noisy.  It attracted too much attention."

Botnet monitoring organization The ShadowServer Foundation reported that "Conficker has managed to infect, and maintain infections on more systems than any other malicious vector that has been seen before now", but its creators — despite suspicions — have still not been positively identified.

And while I'm at it, the Wall Street Journal reports that insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan are using off-the-shelf software such as SkyGrabber, purchased off the Internet, to snoop unsecured communication links on US Predator drones and see what the drone's operator is seeing, enabling them to know what roads and buildings are under drone surveillance.  The Pentagon has known about the vulnerability since the Bosnia campaign in the 199s, but hadn't done anything about it until now because they didn't think any adversary would possess the know-how to exploit it.  The newer, uprated Reaper drone has the same vulnerability, despite the fact that the vulnerability was already known when General Atomics began designing the Reaper.

Personally, I'm boggled that it didn't occur to General Atomics to encrypt drone downlinks in the first place.  It seems like a no-brainer.

Comments

[merlinpendragon]

Here's what gets me: you wrote,

"The Pentagon has known about the vulnerability since the Bosnia campaign in the 199s, but hadn't done anything about it until now because they didn't think any adversary would possess the know-how to exploit it."

Uhm, let's see. Our "adversaries" from the 1990's to the present include Russia, China, North Korea, North Vietnam, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and others. But the Pentagon didn't think "any adversary would possess the know-how" to take advantage of a KNOWN vulnerability in their drones. How ARROGANT of them!

[unixronin]

It's funny that you should mention that.

You see, the US military aerospace sector — in which I include the Pentagon — really looked down its collective nose at Soviet military aircraft technology until the early 90s or so. Soviet aircraft were quite clearly just not even in the same league as US fighters. They didn't have onboard flight-control computers. They had vacuum tube electronics, fer crissakes. They were a joke, hopelessly inferior. It was taken as gospel that anything the US was flying simply had to be far superior to anything those vodka-swilling peasant yokels could put into the air. Why, US aerospace was generations ahead.

Then, in the tail-end of the 80s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, in the age of glasnost and perestroika, Russian pilots demonstrating MiG-29s at the Paris Air Show offered to let a couple of US F15 and F16 jocks try their birds out.

The US fighter jocks flew the MiG-29, and they reported back to their commanding officers, and the commanding officers reported back up the chain, and a whole lot of Generals in the Pentagon shat themselves.

You see, the MiG-29 didn't have a digital onboard flight control computer like the F16's, no. The F16 was designed to be intentionally unstable to improve its maneuverability, and rely on the onboard computers to keep it controllable and flyable. If you lose the onboard computers on an F16, it becomes uncontrollable.

But the MiG-29 didn't have an onboard flight control computer because it didn't need one. Instead of loading it up with computers to make up for cutting corners on the aerodynamics, the Russians had gotten the MiG-29's aerodynamics perfect. It could do anything an F16 could do ... without needing an onboard computer. And those vacuum-tube avionics? They may be simple, but they're highly reliable and inherently EMP-hardened. A MiG-29's radars and targeting systems will still work after flying through a nuclear warhead's EMP burst. An F16's won't. Neither will its onboard computers.

What's more, the MiGs and Sukhois can be operated unimproved runways and rough fields. The Sukhois can even fly from graveled runways. US fighters can't; their landing gear isn't up to rough-field service, and their engines would ingest enough debris on a gravel runway to destroy them.

The Russians proceeded to repeat the demonstration of superior aerodynamics with the MiG-31. Then they went one better, and started showing off moves with the Su-27 and Su-30 that the F15 and F16 couldn't do at all, such as the Pugachev's Cobra maneuver first demonstrated with the Su-27, and the related Cobra Turn. Peroperly performed, Pugachev's Cobra can enable a fighter to fire a missile at a pursuing enemy fighter behind it. In the US service arsenal, only the F-22 Raptor can perform these maneuvers. The Russians are now working on fifth-generation fighters, of which the first example is probably the experimental Sukhoi Su-47 Berkut with its forward-swept wing.

So, yeah, sure, the Russians are primitive and backward. And I can make you a great deal on this historic bridge, conveniently located in Brooklyn, NY....

[rosencrantz23.livejournal.com]

*sigh* it's a sad state of affairs when my wireless router has stronger data security than a $4.5M DoD drone.

[mrakg.livejournal.com]

The mind boggles.

[hrrunka]

a no-brainer

...which all too often seems to mean "no brain power was used on this". There's a saying something like "Military intelligence is an oxymoron".

Truly, the mind boggles...

[lwj2.livejournal.com]

I gather that the Powers That Be didn't bother to consult No Such Agency for a solution, or even better, a preventative.

Par or worse for the course.

Fifty points to House Q'aida for having more sense than House DoD.