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发帖数: 2273 | 1 ISTANBUL, Turkey — Iran guided the CIA's "lost" stealth drone to an intact
landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-
known to the US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on
the captured drone's systems inside Iran.
Iranian electronic warfare specialists were able to cut off communications
links of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel, says the engineer, who works
for one of many Iranian military and civilian teams currently trying to
unravel the drone’s stealth and intelligence secrets, and who could not be
named for his safety.
Using knowledge gleaned from previous downed American drones and a technique
proudly claimed by Iranian commanders in September, the Iranian specialists
then reconfigured the drone's GPS coordinates to make it land in Iran at
what the drone thought was its actual home base in Afghanistan.
"The GPS navigation is the weakest point," the Iranian engineer told the
Monitor, giving the most detailed description yet published of Iran's "
electronic ambush" of the highly classified US drone. "By putting noise [
jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is
where the bird loses its brain."
More world news from the Christian Science Monitor
The “spoofing” technique that the Iranians used – which took into account
precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data –
made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to
crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control
center, says the engineer.
The revelations about Iran's apparent electronic prowess come as the US,
Israel, and some European nations appear to be engaged in an ever-widening
covert war with Iran, which has seen assassinations of Iranian nuclear
scientists, explosions at Iran's missile and industrial facilities, and the
Stuxnet computer virus that set back Iran’s nuclear program.
Now this engineer’s account of how Iran took over one of America’s most
sophisticated drones suggests Tehran has found a way to hit back. The
techniques were developed from reverse-engineering several less
sophisticated American drones captured or shot down in recent years, the
engineer says, and by taking advantage of weak, easily manipulated GPS
signals, which calculate location and speed from multiple satellites. |
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