• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Face It: IRAN PWNED the CIA's Drone!

Page 4 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Huh?

Drone crashes in middle of desert.
US launches missiles/F-22s/whatever.
US bombs/blows the crap out of it.
Iran claims US bombed middle of no where.
US denies these claims.
Iran bitching and moans.
US continues on with business as usual.

Don't see the problem.

Then again, letting the Iranians recover a top secret drone is certainly preferable than upsetting the Iranians.

you forget a critical part

US loses yet more credibility and leverage
 
Huh? Have you read up on that "declining super power" military capabilities these days? Or is that just the typical "America is going down" bashing thats so trendy these days. if America actually fought in a conflict where it didnt hold back, you would see that oh so declining super power. 🙄

Wow this just shows how stupid you are. In the life cycle of a nation, military power actually increases as the nation declines, as it tries to hold onto it's position in the world.

Go get educated, or perhaps more importantly, go look at history. For the record, I love America, had an American girlfriend and almost moved to the states. I just think you guys aren't moving in the right direction.
 
Last edited:
you forget a critical part

US loses yet more credibility and leverage

What leverage?

(And it lost credibility in Iran when it threw the protestors under a bus during their protests but backed those protests in Egypt and Syria.)
 
Wait a second... You mean to tell me that the drones use the public signals from GPS satellites? Our military doesn't use an encoded signal as well & use that for navigation of weapons? Wow.
 
Wow this just shows how stupid you are. In the life cycle of a nation, military power actually increases as it declines, as it tries to hold onto it's position in the world.

Go get educated, or perhaps more importantly, go look at history. For the record, I love America, had an American girlfriend and almost moved to the states. I just think you guys aren't moving in the right direction.

Ok, just realized you're not an Amerrican. That along with your name calling basicaly explains your basis of opinions, No more needs to be said.
 
Maybe I am missing something here. GPS needs 3 signals to know where it is. Iraq sent 3 fake signals to the drone?
 
Wait a second... You mean to tell me that the drones use the public signals from GPS satellites? Our military doesn't use an encoded signal as well & use that for navigation of weapons? Wow.

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126102247889095011.html
 
Wait a second... You mean to tell me that the drones use the public signals from GPS satellites? Our military doesn't use an encoded signal as well & use that for navigation of weapons? Wow.

There are a couple levels of GPS protocols on a satellite . The one that everyone uses in the USA for things like driving has a very limited accuracy. The ones the military uses are capable of resolution up to 2 inches at the equator and up to 6 inches in areas like Iran. The signal cannot be faked or replicated and then sent to the drone unless they have cracked our encryption. The encryption isn't one where you cannot decode the signal without the key , it is one where when you combine 3 different signals they all have to have a value that is the same as what the controllers on the ground are expecting. It changes constantly so to fake it someone would have to fake all 3 satellite signals in real time .

I don't think the CIA lost this drone. Too many things went wrong like nobody sending the destruct command, I think this was a gift to Iran. It wouldn't surprise me if the software and hardware doesn't contain some very special payloads just for Iran.
 
Oh I get it:

bin Laden assassinated: "Wut?? No way Obama had anything to do with that? was he their, MORANS?!"

spy drone hacked and captured by Iran: "HAHA lolbama, what a fucking idiot! lolololol."

do me a favor and find where i said that, ok? i give credit where credit's due. if this happened 5 years ago, I would have posted lolbush. that's the funny part, this administration's not much different than the past one. I don't believe we should be flying drones and firing missiles into sovereign nations. not to mention the "collateral damage" we do taken out a deemed terrorist, so the cia says. really makes us no different than those who attacked us on 9-11.
 
Last edited:
Like EK I'm thinking fake. They might have pieces of a wreck, but that pic has a lot wrong with it. BTW these do have a self destruct.
 
I don't think one Iranian engineer makes a credible source, sorry. The drone may have been owned, but it will take more than this to convince.
 
Given the dubious propagda of some undisclosed Iranian engineer conspiracy theory on this thread, only one real valid question remains.

And that boils down a single question.

Yes or no, was the CIA drone overflyig Afganistan or Iran when the Iranians are alledged to have taken control of the drone?

And pardon me if I am wrong, but it is my understanding that any version that the drone was overflying Afganistan is already debunked.
 
lol, please. A drone wouldn't receive GPS signals from the ground anyways. And for the Iranians to pull off any sort of capture they would have had to have known where the drone was ahead of time, and they would have to detect it, which didn't happen.

I wonder what was planted in this Trojan drone.
 
if this is a trojan drone, we're led by some petty mother fuckers. though we already know that because they asked for it back.
 
considering that some drone info was broadcast unencrypted (i know previously it was video feeds, but still...)

a) this does not surprise me

b) someone is gonna lose their job
 
I don't know which one is more sad.


1. That people would actually fall for this type of Baghdad Bob FUDD released from some Iranian engineer and take it as gospel. Do you really think they can tap into an encrypted military channel and simply "spoof" a GPS signal, guiding the drone down? This isn't a video game. These guys can't even protect their most sophisticated IT systems from Stuxnet. They can't even design jet engines to keep frigging Boeing airliners flying.

2. That people think the appropriate response to the US invading another country's sovereign airspace is to invade it again but with warmaking rather than spying. Not that I care we were spying on Iran, I think it's a great idea. However, escalating the situation over a mere drone is silly. The tech in the drone can't be replicated easily. Shit, China can't even produce it's own milspec engines for front-line fighters.
 
Last edited:
I'm not sure about this drone, but if the Iranians had any brains, their #1 priority should be to obtain a nuclear weapon. Considering how much the GOP candidates have been talking about bombing Iran over the last few years, obtaining a nuclear weapon would probably be in their best interest.
 
I don't know which one is more sad.


1. That people would actually fall for this type of Baghdad Bob FUDD released from some Iranian engineer and take it as gospel. Do you really think they can tap into an encrypted military channel and simply "spoof" a GPS signal, guiding the drone down? This isn't a video game.

Again.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126102247889095011.html


You are giving the US government and Locheed too much credit.
 
There are a couple levels of GPS protocols on a satellite . The one that everyone uses in the USA for things like driving has a very limited accuracy. The ones the military uses are capable of resolution up to 2 inches at the equator and up to 6 inches in areas like Iran. The signal cannot be faked or replicated and then sent to the drone unless they have cracked our encryption. The encryption isn't one where you cannot decode the signal without the key , it is one where when you combine 3 different signals they all have to have a value that is the same as what the controllers on the ground are expecting. It changes constantly so to fake it someone would have to fake all 3 satellite signals in real time .

I don't think the CIA lost this drone. Too many things went wrong like nobody sending the destruct command, I think this was a gift to Iran. It wouldn't surprise me if the software and hardware doesn't contain some very special payloads just for Iran.

I get the impression you are writing primarily about the controllers. I assume these are the command/control centers of the drone. If the drone itself does not receive any more data from the controller, the drone would fly to a preprogrammed save landing zone. The GPS coordinates should have been preprogrammed outside enemy territory, just to be on the save side.

But i would think that the developers of such a plane would have added extra sensors for flight speed, altitude, acceleration, gyroscopes to keep track of roll, pitch and yaw, even magnetic compass and more. Just in the case GPS communication is lost or compromised. Then the drone would just use internal sensors to maintain position or even fly back to a known save location(with room for position error) by backtracking sensor data. Then GPS can be checked again.

By using multiple sensor data in flight and comparing this data with GPS information in real time, it would have been very hard to spoof GPS communication with this drone. The results will be off maybe a hundred miles or kilometers, but that is just a question of making sure that the drone is further away from enemy territory as to compensate for error in position.
Maybe the software/hardware combination of this drone is not advanced or fully developed enough yet for such features, but i seriously doubt that. It asks also for a lot of storage. But this kind of sensor data gathering and comparing is serial in nature thus perfect for current storage technology. Timestamping comparing with speed is the natural index.

It still seems to me as a malfunction, a design flaw,that is only now becoming apparent. These things are known to happen, also in the military.

However, landing the drone on purpose as a trojan horse... Knowing current state of the art technology(not the mainstream cheap consumer tech) It is possible... 😉
 
I continue to see no evidence at all that Iran hacked the drone.

What I think is most likely to have occurred is that the US was flying this drone over Iran, not Afghanistan. For some reason they lost contact and the drone decided it was going to safe land in Iran instead of friendly soil (stupidly). and that was that.
 
Back
Top