Iraqi and Afghan insurgents are currently using cheap software to hack the video feeds of Predator (and likely Reaper) drones. Due the difficulty of adding encryption to a large number of deployed systems, each with high bandwidth video flows (particularly the "Gorgon's Stare" with 10 separate feeds), a quick fix is very unlikely.
Skygrabber was developed by a Russian software company to allow people to snatch the content (media files) that other people were downloading via their satellite Internet connection (all part of the copyright wars currently underway). It has the following description:
But you say, well, well, we get the data, but how do we get the files that other users are downloading? The SkyGrabber can do it. The program intercepts data of other users, assemble in files and saves files in your hard drive. SkyGrabber makes your life more exciting and interesting.
NOTE: I got a flood of e-mails this morning on this story. Thanks much to the global guerrillas community!!
This event isn't an aberration. It is an inevitable development, one that will only occur more and more often. Why? Military cycles of development and deployment take decades due to the dominance of a lethargic, bureaucratic, and bloated military industrial complex. Agility isn't in the DNA of the system nor will it ever be (my recent experience with a breakthrough and inexpensive information warfare system my team built, is yet another example of how FAIL the military acquisition system is).
In contrast, vast quantities of cheap/open/easy technologies (commercial and open source) are undergoing rapid rates of improvement. Combined with tinkering networks that can repurpose them to a plethora of unintended needs (like warfare), this development path becomes an inexorable force. The delta (a deficit from the perspective of the status quo, an advantage for revisionists) between the formal and the informal will only increase as early stage networks that focus specifically on weapons/warfare quickly become larger, richer, etc. (this will happen as they are combined with the economic systems of more complex tribal/community "Darknets").
The idea of building a defense acquisition system that accelerates open source weapons production -- one that outcompetes the military industrial complex by several orders of magnitude in time, cost, effectiveness, flexibility, ease of use, etc. -- sounds like blast!