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Comment by hollerith | Hacker News Reader

I was assuming that the drone operators were in the truck to make it more difficult for the Russians to jam the control signals. Do you know whether that is true?

Maybe the drones were pre-programmed for a particular destination (given to the Ukrainians by the US and its reconnaissance satellites), i.e., no drone operators needed.

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The latest technique is (besides the fiber optic stuff) is running the command and control over the local phone network of the country you’re in so it just looks like regular mobile data. That’s what allegedly happened here.

According to videos published they still seem to be flying drones manually, so won't additional latency introduced by the cellular network & repeaters make this really hard / impossible?

I don’t have a link handy but one of the videos I saw on Twitter looked like there was pretty bad latency. Once they got to the target aircraft they went into a hover and very slowly set it down on the wing before the FPV feed froze.

Edit: https://x.com/jimmysecuk/status/1929164382061092952

they were using ardupilot, so the control they gave is "move to this point then descend", latency does not matter much as long as it's reasonable.

In most of the videos I've seen there are failsafe warnings on the screen indicating a loss of GPS, which I'm not surprised at all about. Russia's well-known for having GPS jammers, and having them on-site at an airforce base when the enemy they've been fighting is using drones is just common sense. The video I linked to really looks to me like it's being stick flown with IMU stabilization but probably without Pos Hold.

Why land slowly if the plan is to blow up the drone?

Because you want it to explode at the right location, not get blown off course by a gust of wind or bounce off the wing and explode in the air.

Exploding on impact seems like a very mature, well-established technology.

Exploding on impact is a mature tech for things like shells, but it requires building a mechanism into the shell so that it won't explode before it is fired.

If the drone will be controlled by a human operator till the end, then it might win for the drone design to avoid the complexity of a sensor to detect impacts and of the aforementioned mechanism.

Also, landing on an airplane wing is easier to train for and to test than a mission plan that involves a drone that explodes on impact.

> Also, landing on an airplane wing is easier to train for and to test than a mission plan that involves a drone that explodes on impact.

...and more importantly it is also easier to automate, i.e. autoland on wing spar, detonate, mission complete.

Have you checked the latency on modern cell networks lately?

I had a friend who was gaming on his phone that was tethered to his desktop about a decade ago and after he disabled some power saving stuff in the settings on android he was getting a reasonable 100ms ping that had negligible jitter.

Starting July 1st all SIM cards in Russia need to have the owner register his biometry and passport details, otherwise the number is blocked. Ukrainians had a window to perform this operation but I doubt they'll have the same approach possible in future.

You think hacking SIMS is not possible in Russia?

What do you mean by that? Stealing someone's sim? Doable, but detectable.

Detectable after the attack is not very useful. They could even clone high ranking officials’ sims cards or the sims of just any regular folk…

Quite easy to track though, like double sign-ins from different devices, uncommon locations, location and speed matching - like phone going 25mph in the forest.

And you don't need to permablock it, few minutes would be enough.

Implementing what you are proposing would be very disruptive nation implementing them.

Oh it’s already implemented since 2000, with SORM system. Think they are to extend it to give direct FSB access without pre-request starting from 1st of september

An LLM explains that "SORM (System for Operative-Investigative Activities) is a Russian system of lawful interception used in telecommunications. SORM is mandated by Russian law, requiring all telecommunications providers to install interception equipment".

Pretty much yes. Basically FSB can perform MITM attacks any time they want, but it still requires an order.

It does not help a lot with end-to-end encryption though

No hack needed. You just give some change to poor people and register the cards in their name. This just raises the price a bit but does not prevent anything.

It will work for sure, anything can be managed with the money.

I think that as far as a security measure this is really up there with the form the US makes you fill out when you visit the country that asks you to tick the box if you are a terrorist.

There are countless ways around this beginning with just asking someone to buy a sim card on your behalf.

The operators weren't present at the site.

They either used the trucks as a relay for the operators far away or the drones themselves were automated.

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