Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

U.S. officials say there is no evidence that militants were able to take control of the drones or otherwise interfere with their flights. Still, the intercepts could give America’s enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under U.S. surveillance.

The drone intercepts mark the emergence of a shadow cyber war within the U.S.-led conflicts overseas.

First, “the emergence of a shadow cyber war” is probably wrong. The very rapid innovation-reaction-innovation cycle has been going on since the first IED’s in Iraq back in 2003. This cycle of open-source warfare is well documented and predicted.

Second, my initial geek reaction was: this is going to be terribly hard to fix because those high-resolution video streams are going to be a bitch to encrypt. There is a delicate balancing act between the available bandwidth (fixed, finite) and the video resolution versus security. With fixed bandwidth, as you add encryption it increases the size of the packets taking up bandwidth.and thus lowering the video resolution.

John Robb concurs:

Iraqi and Afghan insurgents are currently using cheap software to hack the video feeds of Predator (and likely Reaper) drones. Due the difficulty of adding encryption to a large number of deployed systems high bandwidth video flows (particularly the “Gorgon’s Stare” with 10 separate feeds), a quick fix is very unlikely.

Update: According to CBS News and other sources. This vulnerability has existed since the drones were built.

he Air Force became aware of the security vulnerability when copies of Predator video feeds were discovered on a laptop belonging to a Shiite militant late last year, and again in July on other militants’ laptops, the Journal reported. The problem, though, is that the drones use proprietary technology created in the early 1990s, and adding encryption would be an expensive task.

The implications of the Predator’s unencrypted transmissions have been known in military circles for a long time. An October 1999 presentation given at the Air Force’s School of Advanced Airpower Studies in Alabama noted “the Predator UAV is designed to operate with unencrypted data links.”

In 2002, a British engineer who enjoys scanning satellite signals for fun stumbled across a NATO video feed from the Kosovo war. CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips reported then on the apparent surveillance security shortfall, and the U.S. military’s decision to essentially let it slide.

The source of this is the same bone-headed thinking behind every proprietary or limited-access network vedor’s logic: We don’t need encryption/strong security on our network because only our people will have access to it. Normally, my reaction to that is: you deserve whatever you get. However this is tempered in this particular case because “you” is actually “us.” Heads should roll though. This is beyond stupid.

This post is about the increasing ability of open-source groups to project power far beyond what we traditionally think of as guerrilla war.

To wit, an attack this week by the MEND guerrilla group on a Royal Dutch Shell drilling platform 75 miles off the coast of Nigeria. Keep in mind, this is for all intents and purposes, the open ocean. At sea, the horizon is about 11 miles.

The effective disabling of this platform takes 200,000 barrels per day offline. That is as much by which Saudi Arabia pledged last week to increase its production to offset higher prices. According to the BBC Report:

Nigeria’s valuable offshore oilfields had always been considered difficult for most militants to target, the BBC’s Alex Last reports from Lagos.

But early on Thursday, gunmen in boats reached the Bonga installation, Shell’s flagship project, for the first time.

…

A Nigerian navy spokesman confirmed reports that militants had kidnapped a US oil worker from a separate vessel on their way back from the raid.
…
The shutdown has cut a tenth of Nigeria’s total output in one go.

This comes on top of a reduction of at least 20% in recent years following inland attacks.

Capable of producing 200,000 barrels of oil and 150 million sq ft of gas per day
Oil and gas drawn up from 16 well heads on the ocean floor to a processing tanker

Our correspondent says Bonga was new, expensive and working well despite the difficulties and repeated attacks affecting the company’s inshore operations in the Delta.

So, an impoverished, rag-tag militia in Nigeria has the capability to launch an open-sea operation to disable a billion dollar oil drilling operation and cut the production of one of the worlds largest producers of light-sweet crude (the best kind) by one-fifth.

The takeaways from this lesson should be:

One: High oil prices are supply and demand based. The world is using as much oil as it produces every day. Disruptions in all the nasty places where God put the oil cause prices to go up because there is no give in the market.

Two: This is the downside the Internet Age of instant communications and global collaboration which has transformed the world in the last 20 years. While we were busy paying bills online, watching Linux and the free development community have been doing with the Internets: sharing and innovating. And not always in ways that are beneficial to those of us in the Good Ole US of A which invented the whole thing.