Officials Confirm Authenticity of Iranian TV Images Showing Lost U.S. Drone

Fox News ^ | 8 DEC 11 | Jennifer Griffin-Fox

[Amigo04]

U.S. officials have confirmed to Fox News that images aired by Iranian state television do in fact show the secret U.S. drone that went down last week in eastern Iran.

[bert]

The technical term is glide :)

On loss of power the drone glided to earth

What we don’t know is the glide ratio

[ILS21R]

I can vouch for the authenticity of the captured RQ-170. Why are we hiding the landing gear and the complete underside? Don't worry about it. Go watch Oprah now.

[sam_paine]

The drone would be a great way to get more malware onto Iran computers. Load the drone with computer viruses and obsolete or deliberately misleading technology and accidentally crash it. Even if that wasn’t the case, if you could start the rumor, hopefully the Iranians would get a little nervous about hooking their computers up to the thing

No. It would not.

For crap's sake people. This is not Jeff Golblum hooking up his Macbook laptop to an alien spaceship via USB and uploading a virus from the WOPR.

Plug-n-Play has confused the masses.

[crosslink]

I have these questions.
These are programed to return to base if they lose connection. How was this changed?

These are not able to be tracked by radar. How was it found?

This is not damaged. who and how did they land it?

I can not tell you how big a deal this is on so many levels. The communication encryption in these is priceless. If someone has cracked that it is going to be a very expensive retrofit on many levels.

I have to believe someone in the ISI,Egypt or the White House has provided the Russians with this info.

[jefferson31415]

I have another theory.

About 2-3 months ago, I read about how the US connection into the drones were hacked into and that we temporarily lost control of a few drones.

It seems to that this incident may have been a test and now the unknown hacker has finally figured out what to do with this access.

I hope the military has solved this issue; this could be much worse if it was turned on our own troops.

[crosslink]

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/drone-virus-kept-quiet/

Officials at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada knew for two weeks about a virus infecting the drone “cockpits” there. But they kept the information about the infection to themselves — leaving the unit that’s supposed to serve as the Air Force’s cybersecurity specialists in the dark. The network defenders at the 24th Air Force learned of the virus by reading about it in Danger Room.

The virus, which records the keystrokes of remote pilots as their drones fly over places like Afghanistan, is now receiving attention at the highest levels; the four-star general who oversees the Air Force’s networks was briefed on the infection this morning. But for weeks, it stayed (you will pardon the expression) below the radar: a local problem that local network administrators were determined to fix on their own.

“It was not highlighted to us,” says a source involved with Air Force network operations. “When your article came out, it was like, ‘What is this?’”

The drones are still flying over warzones from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Yemen. There’s no sign, yet, that the virus either damaged any of the systems associated with the remotely piloted aircraft or transmitted sensitive information outside the military chain of command — although three military insiders caution that a full-blown, high-level investigation into the virus is only now getting underway.

[KosmicKitty]

Plug and PLay worked for stuxnet

[sam_paine]

No. It did not. That was not the vector, Victor.

[PBRSTREETGANG]

It was designed to land on its own if lost.

So, if lost, it was designed to wind up in enemy hands in pristine condition?

Might call that a minor design flaw.

[Tonytitan]

Here's another possibility: LockMart built this as a Trojan Horse intending it to be landed in hostile territory and captured/analyzed by foreign intel. When they try to apply what they reverse engineer out of it into home grown copies and they start feeding intel to the US, what kind of intel coup would that be. Who knows what little malware goodies have been planted into the thing waiting to be uploaded.

[Tonytitan]

Here's another possibility: LockMart built this as a Trojan Horse intending it to be landed in hostile territory and captured/analyzed by foreign intel. When they try to apply what they reverse engineer out of it into home grown copies and they start feeding intel to the US, what kind of intel coup would that be. Who knows what little malware goodies have been planted into the thing waiting to be uploaded.

[Tonytitan]

Here's another possibility: LockMart built this as a Trojan Horse intending it to be landed in hostile territory and captured/analyzed by foreign intel. When they try to apply what they reverse engineer out of it into home grown copies and they start feeding intel to the US, what kind of intel coup would that be. Who knows what little malware goodies have been planted into the thing waiting to be uploaded.

[cripplecreek]

I realize they’re expensive but handing the technology to our enemies is an incalculable loss.

My only hope is that the electronics were designed to fry themselves which is where the real secret stuff is.

[Tonytitan]

Here's another possibility: LockMart built this as a Trojan Horse intending it to be landed in hostile territory and captured/analyzed by foreign intel. When they try to apply what they reverse engineer out of it into home grown copies and they start feeding intel to the US, what kind of intel coup would that be. Who knows what little malware goodies have been planted into the thing waiting to be uploaded.

[maineman]

The media continues to protect this POS. He allowed Iran to have our technology because he didn’t want to destroy it. Can we survive this a-hole?

[Elle Bee]

That this could happen just leaves me speechless. You’d think at the very least they’d have some sort self-destruct mechanism on the thing. That our idiot of a president would not send in people to trash the thing shows how far our present government has dragged us down.

its almost like serving up our technology on a platter ...unintentionally of course /sarcasm>

.

[exit82]

We use the front grills from 1978 Camaros in our drones?

And it could use some 1963 Corvette rear bumpers to dress it up.

I thought this was confirmed as a fake. There's another FR thread about it. It cratered, not landed intact.

Iranian modelmakers had a field day.

[Tonytitan]

Here's another possibility: LockMart built this as a Trojan Horse intending it to be landed in hostile territory and captured/analyzed by foreign intel. When they try to apply what they reverse engineer out of it into home grown copies and they start feeding intel to the US, what kind of intel coup would that be. Who knows what little malware goodies have been planted into the thing waiting to be uploaded.

[ZX12R]

Here's another possibility: LockMart built this as a Trojan Horse intending it to be landed in hostile territory and captured/analyzed by foreign intel.

I'm wishing that the pentagon built it, and with an enormous thermo-nuclear warhead inside, that is now ticking down to a very large glass parking lot construction event.

[bert]

My analysis is that as they said, or i think i read they said, it ran out of fuel loitering over a selected area. Out of fuel it can still fly by gliding to a landing. That can be controlled or uncontrolled, we don’t know which.

If the radio link were lost it could continue to fly till ran out of gas. It could then glide down to a belly landing and not actually “crash”

bottom line though, we don’t know and likely will never know what really happened