The Christian Science Monitor quoted the unnamed Iranian scientist who claimed that his team of cyber hackers took over the stealth drone’s GPS signal and redirected it to land in a location in Iran instead of its base in Afghanistan.
But American experts were dismissive, saying that to accomplish such a feat would be a stretch even for countries with more sophisticated cyber experts and better technology.
To divert a top-notch stealth drone with highly complex systems would require at least three, if not more, extremely difficult steps:
First, Iran would have to detect the stealth drone as it hovered up to 50,000 feet above ground; second, Iranian hackers would have to jam the GPS signal; and third, they would have to feed the drone “Trojan” signals, correctly encrypted, to deceive it to land in Iran.
Although experts concede that none of these steps is impossible, each of them is extremely difficult and, on aggregate, pose a near-impossible technological challenge for anyone, not just Iran.
“The weak point in the Iranian argument is how they detected the drone in the first place, which I find implausible given the existing quality of their air-defense system, which is not sufficiently sophisticated to detect it,” Dennis Gormley of the University of Pittsburgh told the Christian Science Monitor.
Gormley is an expert on unmanned aerial systems and has experience in intelligence operations. “Their air defenses are of a type that doesn’t have the ability to detect a low-cross-section [stealth] vehicle like the RQ- 170,” he said.
But Iran claims to have mastered stealth technology. Its claims of mastery exceed those of Russia and China.
John Bumgarner of the US Cyber Consequences Unit, a non- profit cyber warfare think tank, said it would be “almost like science fiction” for Iran to detect the American drone.
But if Iran indeed detected the drone, the subsequent step involving the jamming of its signal would be comparatively easier because of the inherent weaknesses in GPS technology.
It is believed that Hezbollah has been in able to detect and crash Israeli drones in the past, although those vehicles have The Iranian engineer told the Christian Science Monitor his team found a simpler solution to the daunting task: They located a site in Iran with the same latitude (east-west axis) as the drone’s base at Shindand in Af-ghanistan. Then all they had to do, he said, was override the longitude (north-south axis) setting for the drone’s pre-programmed landing site. He said his team did that by using information they had previously collected from crashing other US drones. However, this explanation does not hold water because the latitude where Iran said the drone landed is far from the latitude of Shindand. Shindand is at latitude 33 degrees 40 minutes north. Iran said the drone landed near the town of Kashmar, which lies at latitude 35 degrees 25 minutes north or about 210 kilometers (130 miles) north of the latitude of the drone’s base. (See map below.) Thus Iran’s own explanation of where it landed the drone contradicts the engineer’s explanation to the Christian Science Monitor of how the drone was nabbed. Regardless of how Iran was able to lay its hands on the drone, however, the Islamic Republic now possesses a premiere piece of stealth technology and one of the most if not the most sophisticated spy drone in the American inventory. The intelligence that the drone’s sensors have collected is not critical, but Americans worry that Iran might reverse engineer some parts of the drone and mimic its technology or, worse, share it with China or Russia to help them understand its complex technology.