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Beware Of The WASP/REMOTE-CONTROLLED ARMY DRONE MODIFIED TO HACK YOUR WI-FI

Two self-proclaimed hackers — former information technology employees for the U.S. Air Force — have modified an army drone that can “discreetly break into Wi-Fi networks, emit jamming signals and even pose as a cellphone tower to intercept communications from the ground,” according to Popular Science.

Richard Perkins and Mike Tassey spent two years and $6,000 to create this Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform — pet named Vespid, which is Latin for wasp — that they envision use for in surveillance applications.

Here’s what it takes according to Popular Science:

FQM-117B Army target drone
High-powered radio antenna
32-gigabyte USB drive
4G USB dongle
Two lithium-polymer batteries
Perkins and Tassey removed the drone’s original radio system, which they replaced with some of the above components for hacking capabilities. The drone can fly for about a half hour on its battery power and has soared up to 22,000 feet.

Popular Science reports that then men showcased Vespid to prove a point at an August security conference:

If they could construct a spy drone from legal, off-the-shelf components for a few thousand dollars, then despite its complexity, others could do the same — including those with nefarious motives.
Other than being capable of hacking, the modified drone also could have some more honorable applications such as providing Wi-Fi and cell service in disaster zones.

Arduino Can Be Helpful

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators. The microcontroller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring) and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing). Arduino projects can be stand-alone or they can communicate with software running on a computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP).
The boards can be built by hand or purchased preassembled; the software can be downloaded for free. The hardware reference designs (CAD files) are available under an open-source license, you are free to adapt them to your needs.
http://www.arduino.cc/
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/arduino-technology-explained/

CIA Black Ops Propaganda ? / Or Genuine Hi-Tech Drone Hi-jacking By The Iranians ?

It's an intriguing scenario - worth of a novel or a movie - a super secret US spy drone gets "hacked" by unfriendly forces.

"The Agency" would have us believe Iran managed to jam a top secret sophisticated drone’s communication links to American operators by forcing it to shift into autopilot mode. With its communications down, the drone allegedly kicked into autopilot mode, relying on GPS to fly back to base in Afghanistan. With the GPS autopilot on, the engineer claims Iran spoofed the drone’s GPS system with false coordinates, fooling it into thinking it was close to home and landing into Iran’s clutches. Or so the Mossad/CIA would like us to think.

It is possible - but not very probable. It would require highly compartmentalized top secret inside information and sophisticated super-computer hacking capabilities along with considerable signal intercept capabilities the likes Iran does not have.

Techies are quick to point out that a few years ago insurgents were eavesdropping on the unencrypted video feeds of Predator drones.

The drone intercepts mark the emergence of a shadow cyber war within the U.S.-led- caused conflicts overseas. They also point to a potentially serious vulnerability in Washington's growing network of unmanned drones, which have become the American weapon of choice in both Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, and now over the Battlefield America, thanks to HR 658, and the traitors in congress, and the senate that need to be arrested, and locked away for life. Not to mention the last 30-40 years of traitors in the white house.

In that case it was clear that US military planners underestimated the technical sophistication of the enemy, compounded by rushing Predators into service without enough encrypted satellite feeds to handle them all and (as a result) Iraqi insurgents (using a cheap piece of software called "SkyGrabber") were able to not only tell when they were being watched but could actually intercept the video and watch it live.

Technically this isn't "hacking" because it didn't allow the insurgents to get inside the UAV control system, and the video feeds were being broadcast in the clear.

However, being able to watch the Predator feeds did provide insurgents with valuable intelligence and advanced warning whenever (and wherever) the UAV were up and hunting.

Since then, sources inside the military say the fix is in - and all feeds are now encrypted. Proof is in the incredible success the US has had (this year alone) in hunting down and blowing up high-ranking terrorist insurgents - over eighty at last count.

That said - it's a given that UAV control links are also encrypted and very hard to intercept.

UAVs (even semi-autonomous ones like the RQ-170) are directed via redundant narrow-banded frequency-hoping microwave (Low Probability of Intercept) KU Band satellite links that are incredibly difficult to detect let alone capture - or for that matter hack into.

If it was at all possible to hack the UAV control path - it would require a supercomputer - or better yet - a bank of supercomputers to break the encryption - and even that night not work.

Could it be that Russia who covets Iran's oil and has helped them immensely (in their quest to acquire the bomb) may have helped Iran "hack" into the US's super stealthy spy drone control system - hijacking it or causing it to crash?

Probably not - but if there is even the slightest possibility chances are US military strategists and planners will be burning the midnight oil to find out.

But - then comes the reality check. First, the obvious question, how would Iran know when a stealthy drone is in the local airspace available to hack - when they don't show up on radar?

Iran's radar is fairly sophisticated - obtained from (who else) Russia and even as such is still not much of a threat to a stealth drone (such as the RQ-170) cruising at 90,000 feet. It is a fact - all American stealth aircraft are designed around defeating Russian military radar systems - including the dumbed-down versions they sale for export.

Not only is the RQ-170 stealthy - it is small and the chances are one was detected are incredibly slim.

But what if - Iran knew whenever a RQ-170 was flying over their country - say through some mustache twirling b-movie secret agent - an imbedded Boris - as it were- alerting them to the overflights - routes -frequencies used etc.

Could they somehow (assuming they had the technical know-how, and the flight control software and (incredibly) were able to crack the frequency hopping signals that tell the drone what to do - hijack the Beast of Kandahar?

Before launch, UAVs like the RQ-170 are set up via a direct wired connection with special authentication keys that can't be snatched out of the airwaves. When queried by the satellite link controlling the drone - all authentication keys must match with the ground/mobile station. If the authentication fails - the link is rejected. If no authenticated link can be established, the drone is programmed to fly back to it's point of origin or other landing sites under friendly control.

However, imagine a covert ops/ussocom movie scene - drone controllers at Creech AFB are pulling their hair out because they can't control their secret sky spy.

Someone frantically pushes a button to trigger a self-distruct - and nothing happens.

The drone controllers watch helplessly as their secret stealth UAV soft-lands in Iran, only to be circled by grinning Iranian military, giving Uncle Sam the middle finger and chanting "Allahu Akbar" as they dance and fire their AK-47s in celebration.

The American public eats this stuff up - BUT IT'S PURE FICTION ...

It's easy for CIA fiction writers to invent the perfect black box to make the hijacking of a drone seem plausible - but in reality - what most likely happened was a malfunction that resulted in a crash, or our guys put it there on purpose.

But still - could it have been shot down - as Iran claims?

Again, stealthy high flyers such as the RQ-170 are virtually invulnerable when it comes to enemy fire. Bullets won't reach and even high-flying missiles can't lock on a small stealthy UAV. Although Iran is boasting it shot down a drone

Iran has downed (or claimed) to have downed several Israeli drones - but the photos they have released aren't of stealthy high-flyers.

The majority of the downed drones are short-range, low altitude or hand launched mini drones - the kind vulnerable to small arms fire.

However - there is another possible way to down a high flying UAV like the RQ-170 and it doesn't require hacking or jets, bullets or bombs. What it does require is some advanced technical ability and a unique weapon - something Russia is known to have in it's arsenal.

The Russians are geniuses at building jammers.

According to a story on AFP (published in October) : "Russia has sent a set of mobile radar jammers to Iran and is negotiating future deliveries that Moscow believes do not contravene the current UN sanction regime on the Islamic state.

The Avtobaza truck-mounted jammers are a part of a broader line of arms that Russia hopes to sell Iran despite concerns over Tehran's nuclear programme, the deputy head of the military and technical cooperation agency said.

"This is a defensive system," the agency's deputy director Konstantin Biryulin was quoted as saying by the state RIA Novosti news agency.

"We are not talking about jets, submarines or even S-300 (missile) systems. We are talking about providing security for the Iranian state."

So that's how you down a UAV.

Once you know it's up - you clear the airspace and pump the airwaves so full of radiated microwave power the UAV can't hear - goes dumb - or the microwaves overload and burn out the autonomous brain - causing the UAV to wander aimlessly, eventually running out of fuel and crashing in Iran.

To down a drone, no hacking is needed. Just blast it with radio waves.

But the worlds' media has already seized on the remote possibility that the UAVS can be "hacked" or "hijacked" because it -well - sounds sinister and dredges up all kinds of US Constitution dissolving, Phony TSA Terror possibilities.

NEW CYBERWARFARE!

So how about implanting a virus? Wasn't something like that in the news not too long ago?

A recent article on a virus that infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones was given more press than it deserved. It was a common type - a keystroke logger - the same type your computer can get - and has been removed.

The virus probably entered the system via an infected USB thumb drive. Once found it became clear it wasn't engineered to take over the control of a military drone and in fact was quite ineffectual.

Reaper & Predator drones aren't hooked up to the Internet so there was no-way for the virus to transmit its' acquired keystoke data to whomever engineered it.

However, it's a better military industrial complex anti-terror story to imagine UAVs hijacked by an enemy uber-hacker to maybe even turned against us - plus -it gives the the media, and the RINO Neocon Defense Industry sellouts the excuse to use the new cool-sounding-term: "new cyber-warfare!"

The first clear pictures of the center-line reconnaissance bay on Lockheed Martin’s RQ-170 Sentinel show that the small unmanned aircraft was carrying sensor balls mounted in an internal compartment with specially treated transparent panels—developed for the F-22—when one of them crashed in Iran on Dec. 4.

The new pictures were taken at Kandahar airport in Afghanistan on Sept. 30. The images show that a wheels-up landing would have inflicted massive damage to the bay and sensor package.. That package is “similar to some of the podded electro-optical/infra-red [EO/IR]systems” used by other non-stealthy aircraft and unmanned aerial systems, says a veteran black-world engineer with insight into U.S. UAS programs.

The "accident" was caused by a “lost [data] link, followed by, or simultaneous with, another malfunction,” says a second official involved with the program. Putting the loss into perspective, “We’ve lost over 50 MQ-1s [Predators] and 9s [Reapers], so this should not be a surprise.”

The U.S. Air Force squadron that flew Sentinels was activated in 2005 and the stealthy, unmanned aircraft was first photographed at Kandahar in 2007. Early RQ-170 operations were conducted from both Afghanistan—with CIA involvement—and South Korea.

The RQ-170s were brought back to the U.S. in 2009, re-equipped with a full-motion video (FMV) camera, and then redeployed to Afghanistan, say USAF intelligence officials. At that time it was operated by the USAF 432nd Wing’s 30th Reconnaissance Sqdn. (RS), then at the Tonopah Test Range Airport in the northwest corner of the USAF Nevada Test and Training Range. The wing also flies the Predator and Reaper, and the Tonopah base was once the clandestine home of the F-117 stealth fighter.

Prior to refitting, the aircraft carried a long-range, EO/IR camera thought by U.S. analysts to be used for monitoring missile tests and other activities in sparsely populated eastern Iran.

The RQ-170’s operational altitude of 50,000 ft. gives it an advantage over other lower-cost UAVs and the manned RC-135 Cobra Ball (for monitoring foreign missile tests) that are restricted to about 30,000 ft. and below. However, the Sentinel is not a high-end, very low-observable stealth design with sophisticated sensors. It is instead a robust, reduced-signature, sensor truck designed to maintain high sortie rates.

Other stealth design features include a variant of the “toothpick” leading-edge profile developed for the B-2. Stealth dictates sharp leading edges, but bluff shapes are better for aerodynamics and stability. The compromise on the RQ-170 and B-2 is to make the edges sharp at their ends, where more radar scattering is most likely, and more blunt at the mid-point.

Initially, flights are thought to have been conducted along the borders of Afghanistan. avoiding the airspace of neighboring countries. However, after adding shorter-range FMV, the aircraft operated in Pakistan’s airspace to monitor the compound of Osama bin Laden, and later over Iran, defense officials say.

The RQ-170 has a dual history of operations for both the CIA and Air Force.

The Defense Information Security Agency is starting to build the war net

Military contractors - and information-technology creators not usually associated with weapons systems - formed a consortium to develop the war net on Sept. 28. The group includes an A-list of military contractors and technology powerhouses: Boeing; Cisco Systems; Factiva, a joint venture of Dow Jones and Reuters; General Dynamics; Hewlett-Packard; Honeywell; I.B.M.; Lockheed Martin; Microsoft; Northrop Grumman; Oracle; Raytheon; and Sun Microsystems. They are working to weave weapons, intelligence and communications into a seamless web.

The Pentagon has tried this twice before

Its Worldwide Military Command and Control System, built in the 1960's, often failed in crises. A $25 billion successor, Milstar, was completed in 2003 after two decades of work. Pentagon officials say it is already outdated: more switchboard than server, more dial-up than broadband, it cannot support 21st-century technology.

The Pentagon's scientists and engineers, starting four decades ago, invented the systems that became the Internet. Throughout the cold war, their computer power ran far ahead of the rest of the world.

In 1999, Pentagon officials told Congress that "this monumental task will span a quarter-century or more." This year, the vision gained focus, and Pentagon officials started explaining it in some detail to Congress.

Its scope was described in July by the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog agency for Congress.

Many new multibillion-dollar weapons and satellites are "critically dependent on the future network," the agency reported. "Despite enormous challenges and risks - many of which have not been successfully overcome in smaller-scale efforts" like missile defense, "the Pentagon is depending on the GIG to enable a fundamental transformation in the way military operations are conducted."

According to Art Cebrowski, director of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation, "What we are really talking about is a new theory of war." Linton Wells II, the chief information officer at the Defense Department, said net-centric principles were becoming "the center of gravity" for war planners.

Top Secret

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SkyGrabber

Insurgents have reportedly intercepted live video feeds from the U.S. military's Predator drones using a $25.95 Windows application that allows them to track the pilotless aircraft undetected.

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Hackers working with militants were able to determine which areas of the country were under surveillance by the U.S. military, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, adding that video feeds from drones in Afghanistan also appear to have been compromised.
Meanwhile, a senior Air Force officer said Wednesday that a wave of new surveillance aircraft, both manned and unmanned, were being deployed to Afghanistan, and now all across the USA, to bolster "eyes in the sky" protection for the influx of troops ordered by El Presidente Obama.

This apparent security breach, which had been known in military and intelligence circles to be possible, arose because the Predator unmanned aerial vehicles do not use encryption in the final link to their operators on the ground.
(By contrast, every time you log on to a bank or credit card Web site, or make a phone call on most modern cellular networks, your communications are protected by encryption technology.)

When a Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, is far from its base, terrain prohibits it from transmitting directly to its operator. Instead, it switches to a satellite link. That means an enterprising hacker can use his own satellite dish, a satellite modem, and a copy of the SkyGrabber Windows utility sold by the Russian company SkySoftware to intercept and display the UAV's transmissions.

The 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 Air Force had hoped to replace the Predator with a stealthier, high-altitude version nicknamed "Darkstar," and the 1999 presentation by then-Maj. Jeffrey Stephenson noted that the new "high altitude UAVs will be capable of encryption." But the Defense Department informed Lockheed Martin that year that the Darkstar program would be terminated.

Iraqi interest in intercepting U.S. military transmissions is not exactly new. A report prepared for the CIA director after the U.S. invasion and occupation noted that Saddam Hussein assigned a young relative with a master's degree in computer science to intercept transmissions from U.S. satellites. The relative, "Usama," was secretly given office space in the Baghdad Aerospace Research Center, which had access to satellite downlinks.

The 2005 CIA report compiled by special advisor Charles Duelfer quotes Abd al-Tawab Huwaysh, Saddam's minister of industry, as saying he was shown real-time overhead video supposedly of U.S. military installations in Turkey, Kuwait, and Qatar before the invasion. A likely explanation, the report concludes, is that "Usama located and downloaded the unencrypted satellite feed from U.S. military UAVs."

A 1996 briefing by Paul Kaminski, an undersecretary of defense for acquisition and technology, may offer a hint about how the Iraqi's interception was done. Kaminski said that the military had turned to commercial satellites -- "Hughes is the primary provider of direct (satellite) TV that you can buy in the United States, and that's the technology we're leveraging off of" -- to share feeds from Predator drones.

"What this does is it provides now a broader distribution path to anybody who's in that downward receiving beam, for example," Kaminski said.

So why, after the CIA publicly reported that Predator transmissions had probably been intercepted in Iraq, did the Air Force do so little? One explanation is that the contractor, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems of San Diego, built the system in the early 1990s before encryption was common and easier to include. (Computer scientists had warned at the time that the U.S. government's anti-encryption laws were counter-productive because they discouraged the development and routine use of that technology.)

Bureaucratic inertia is another. As CBSNews.com reported last month, messages from President Clinton's entourage were intercepted in 1997, but Secret Service agents continued to use unencrypted pagers to share sensitive information about threats to the president's life on September 11, 2001. Perhaps it takes a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal to prod government officials into rethinking their views on the desirability of encryption.

Update 1 p.m. ET: A spokesman for the Air Force, Maj. Cristin Marposon, sent us this statement: "The Department of Defense constantly evaluates and seeks to improve the performance and security of our various (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) systems and platforms. As we identify shortfalls, we correct them as part of a continuous process of seeking to improve capabilities and security. As a matter of policy, we don't comment on specific vulnerabilities or intelligence issues."

But GPS spoofing is certainly doable. And if it’s true, it builds on a recent history of security flaws with the drones, from their unencrypted video feeds to their vulnerability to malware.

It’s possible to spoof unencrypted civilian GPS systems. But military GPS receivers, such as the one likely installed on the missing drone, use the encrypted P(Y)-code to communicate with satellites. The notion that Iran could have cracked through the encryption “sounds like a made-for-TV movie” says John Pike, a satellite expert and president of Globalsecurity.org. ”If they could overcome the sorts of of crypto systems that would protect this drone, they would not waste their time on surveillance drones. They would be breaking into banks.”

But Iran might not have had to break the encryption on the P(Y) code in order to bring down a drone. According to Richard Langley, a GPS expert at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, it’s theoretically possible to take control of a drone by jamming the P(Y) code and forcing a GPS receiver to use the unencrypted, more easily spoofable C/A code to to get its directions from navigational satellites.

“GPS satellites transmit on two legacy radio frequencies,” Langley explains. The unencrypted C/A code used by most civilian GPS unit “is transmitted only on the L1 frequency. The encrypted P code for so-called authorized military users is transmitted on both the L1 and L2 frequency.”

Translated: If the Iranians could selectively jam the encrypted military code on the L1 and L2 frequencies — and that’s a big “if” — the drone’s GPS receiver might reach out to use the less-secure C/A code in a last ditch attempt to get directions. Without the extra protection of encryption, it would be relatively simple for Iran to spoof the receiver using the C/A code and fool the drone into thinking it was back home in Afghanistan.

However. For that scenario to work, the drone’s GPS unit would have to be programmed to use the C/A code in the event the P(Y) code becomes unavailable.

It’s also difficult to jam a drone’s GPS. “They’ve got defenses against these kinds of spoofing attacks,” says Todd Humphreys, who has researched GPS spoofing at the University of Texas’ Radionavigation Laboratory. “They mount their antennas on the top of the drones and sometimes the antennas have the ability to null out jamming or spoofing signals.”

Humphreys isn’t buying the Iranian engineer’s explanation of why the apparent RQ-170 Sentinel’s underbelly appeared damaged in the footage released by Iran. The engineer told the Monitor that the drone’s underbelly was scuffed because of a slight difference between the altitude of its actual home base in Afghanistan and the location where it allegedly landed in Iran.

“This is nonsense,” says Humphreys. If the Iranians had been able to spoof the GPS unit in the precise way they claimed, they also would have also been able to control its altitude. “That opens up two scenarios. Either [the engineer] is a user of equipment he’s got from abroad” and doesn’t understand its capabilities, “or he’s making it up.”

The spoofing danger isn’t new. “On the military side,” says Humphreys, “they’ve known about this threat for 20-30 years.”

And this isn’t the first time Iran or its proxies have exploited a long-known vulnerability on an American drone. In 2008, the U.S. military discovered Iranian-backed insurgents in Iraq had managed to intercept unencrypted video feeds from drones using widely available commercial software. That flaw was known to the Air Force as far back as 1996.

Other drone vulnerabilities have also highlighted security fears. In October, Danger Room broke the news that the cockpits at the Air Force’s drone fleet based out of Creech Air Force Base in Nevada were infected with a virus. Malware had apparently made its way onto computers because someone had been using one to play the Mafia Wars game — a stunning security faux pas.

It’s by no means clear that Iran really did spoof the drone’s GPS. But if they did. “If this was really that easy, I’m disappointed,” Humphreys says, “because a lot of very smart people have put a lot of time into this.”

Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet

A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.

The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.

“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.

Drones have become America’s tool of choice in both its conventional and shadow wars, allowing U.S. forces to attack targets and spy on its foes without risking American lives. Since President Obama assumed office, a fleet of approximately 30 CIA-directed drones have hit targets in Pakistan more than 230 times; all told, these drones have killed more than 2,000 suspected militants and civilians, according to the Washington Post. More than 150 additional Predator and Reaper drones, under U.S. Air Force control, watch over the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. American military drones struck 92 times in Libya between mid-April and late August. And late last month, an American drone killed top terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki — part of an escalating unmanned air assault in the Horn of Africa and southern Arabian peninsula.

But despite their widespread use, the drone systems are known to have security flaws. Many Reapers and Predators don’t encrypt the video they transmit to American troops on the ground. In the summer of 2009, U.S. forces discovered “days and days and hours and hours” of the drone footage on the laptops of Iraqi insurgents. A $26 piece of software allowed the militants to capture the video.

The lion’s share of U.S. drone missions are flown by Air Force pilots stationed at Creech, a tiny outpost in the barren Nevada desert, 20 miles north of a state prison and adjacent to a one-story casino. In a nondescript building, down a largely unmarked hallway, is a series of rooms, each with a rack of servers and a “ground control station,” or GCS. There, a drone pilot and a sensor operator sit in their flight suits in front of a series of screens. In the pilot’s hand is the joystick, guiding the drone as it soars above Afghanistan, Iraq, or some other battlefield.

Some of the GCSs are classified secret, and used for conventional warzone surveillance duty. The GCSs handling more exotic operations are top secret. None of the remote cockpits are supposed to be connected to the public internet. Which means they are supposed to be largely immune to viruses and other network security threats.

But time and time again, the so-called “air gaps” between classified and public networks have been bridged, largely through the use of discs and removable drives. In late 2008, for example, the drives helped introduce the agent.btz worm to hundreds of thousands of Defense Department computers. The Pentagon is still disinfecting machines, three years later.

Use of the drives is now severely restricted throughout the military. But the base at Creech was one of the exceptions, until the virus hit. Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is believed to have spread through these removable drives. Drone units at other Air Force bases worldwide have now been ordered to stop their use.

In the meantime, technicians at Creech are trying to get the virus off the GCS machines. It has not been easy. At first, they followed removal instructions posted on the website of the Kaspersky security firm. “But the virus kept coming back,” a source familiar with the infection says. Eventually, the technicians had to use a software tool called BCWipe to completely erase the GCS’ internal hard drives. “That meant rebuilding them from scratch” — a time-consuming effort.

The Air Force declined to comment directly on the virus. “We generally do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, or responses to our computer networks, since that helps people looking to exploit or attack our systems to refine their approach,” says Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for Air Combat Command, which oversees the drones and all other Air Force tactical aircraft. “We invest a lot in protecting and monitoring our systems to counter threats and ensure security, which includes a comprehensive response to viruses, worms, and other malware we discover.”

However, insiders say that senior officers at Creech are being briefed daily on the virus.

“It’s getting a lot of attention,” the source says. “But no one’s panicking. Yet.”