The Future of War: Hacking Drones

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A recent report of a U.S. surveillance drone flying over the Crimea region of Ukraine being hacked by Russian forces, is just one of many indications that the twenty-first-century global battlefield will take place in cyberspace.

The U.S. military has defined “information warfare” to indicate a new face of warfare which can elude cyberthreats and the manipulation of wireless networks. According to US News, military “cyberoperations” were once considered attacking and defending networks and connected devices, and hacking was associated with an intrusion into remote computers through wired channels. Today, however, cyberoperators operate wirelessly. Radio and other frequencies which cover the electromagnetic spectrum are the new contested domain.

iHLS – Israel Homeland Security

According to HLS News Wire the U.S. Navy established the Fleet Electronic Warfare Center (FEWC) in 2008, merging electronic warfare and information technology functions, and recently the Army’s Integrated Cyber and Electronic Warfare (ICE) program acknowledged that the boundaries between traditional cyberthreats, such as someone using the Internet to hack, and traditional electronic warfare threats, such as radio-controlled improvised explosives devices (IEDs) which use the electromagnetic spectrum, have been blurred.