Hacked and Bombed!

The Israelis have bombed the Syrians, but that's not something out of the ordinary, as these countries have been at war since 1967. Now, what is somewhat weird is that they managed to bypass every defense system, reaching their target, just south of the Turkish border.

They used F-15 and F-16 planes to get there and bomb the target. These planes aren't what you'd call state of the art and they have no stealth technology. Flying under the radar is dangerous, but still they managed to get where they wanted and drop the bombs. So how was this possible? There is nothing known for sure, there are just speculations about this, some of which you can read in Aviation Week.

They say that the Israelis could have hacked the Syrians' radar system and made it work for their benefits. A hacker could make a radar search in the wrong place, while planes fly on another route, so practically, they're not undetectable, but nobody would be searching for them if a hacker could meddle with the defense systems.

It is not sure if the Israelis have used this tactic or not, but what I've just said here - I mean, hacking a computer to avoid radar detection - is very much possible. Like that movie from the DHS showed, a lot of bad things could happen when tampering with computer controlled machinery. This also shows that state-of-the art measures have their vulnerabilities too. Older radars may not be as effective, but no computer hacker could access a radar machine from the 1950s and make it scan somewhere else than it was supposed to.

I've tried to cover just the cyber-security part, so you could say the article is somewhat brief, but if you want to read more about the whole situation, click here for the full Aviation Week material.