14 DAY TRIAL // Iran celebrates a major victory on the United States after they managed to take over the controls of an RQ-170 stealth drone by launching a cyber attack against it.
There was no physical weaponry utilized to bring down the aircraft, cyber weapons being much more effective in this case, DEBKAfile reports.
This is a major hit to the US and Israel since they were planning on going after Iran’s nuclear program, but they’ve got bigger issues, since the Middle East country now has access to all the secret components built into the warplane.
Stealth coating, sensors, cameras and all the data collected by the unnamed aerial vehicle (UAV) are now available for the capturers to study. The same sources state that while the Obama administration decided not to send military forces to retrieve the RQ-170, Israeli state officials seem to be more determined than ever to launch a strike against Tehran’s nuclear program.
An interesting thing about the incident is that the drone was programmed to self-destruct in case it went out of control or fell into the wrong hands, but somehow, the automated mechanism was overridden and the plane landed almost unharmed.
While it’s not uncommon for these flying spies to go missing, a few questions pop up in the minds of military officials, especially since Iran shouldn’t have known that it had entered their territories. How could computer hackers take over the UAV and how did they manage to control it to land almost perfectly?
Another important aspect is that the self-destruct feature could have been manually activated in case the automated system failed.
The only explanation is that the hackers who managed to take charge of the RQ-170 were somehow able to not only deactivate the self-destruct mechanism, but also to disable remote access to it for all other controllers.
