By Siob­han Gor­man, Yochi J. Dreazen and August Cole

(WSJ)  Mil­i­tants in Iraq have used $26 off-​​the-​​shelf soft­ware to inter­cept live video feeds from U.S. Preda­tor drones, poten­tially pro­vid­ing them with infor­ma­tion they need to evade or mon­i­tor U.S. mil­i­tary operations.

Senior defense and intel­li­gence offi­cials said Iranian-​​backed insur­gents inter­cepted the video feeds by tak­ing advan­tage of an unpro­tected com­mu­ni­ca­tions link in some of the remotely flown planes’ sys­tems. Shi­ite fight­ers in Iraq used soft­ware pro­grams such as Sky­Grab­ber — avail­able for as lit­tle as $25.95 on the Inter­net — to reg­u­larly cap­ture drone video feeds, accord­ing to a per­son famil­iar with reports on the matter.

U.S. offi­cials say there is no evi­dence that mil­i­tants were able to take con­trol of the drones or oth­er­wise inter­fere with their flights. Still, the inter­cepts could give America’s ene­mies bat­tle­field advan­tages by remov­ing the ele­ment of sur­prise from cer­tain mis­sions and mak­ing it eas­ier for insur­gents to deter­mine which roads and build­ings are under U.S. surveillance.

Read the rest: Insur­gents Hack U.S. Drones — WSJ​.com.