Comment by angersock
13 years ago
Perhaps the funniest/scariest snippet of the article is a chat transcript:
[03:31:27] <2/1BDE_BAE_FSE> IMMEDIATE Fire Mission, POO, Grid 28M MC 13245 24512, Killbox 32AY1SE, POI GRID 28M MC 14212 26114, Killbox 32AY3NE, MAX ORD 8.5K
[03:31:28] <CRC_Resolute> 2/1BDE_BAE_FSE, stby wkng
[03:31:57] <CRC_Resolute> 2/1BDE_BAE_FSE, Resolute all clear
[03:32:04] <2/1BDE_BAE_FSE> c
[03:41:23] <2/1BDE_BAE_FSE> EOM
[03:41:31] <CRC_Resolute> c
It's a like a normal botnet, except it's commanding our troops.
I thought it would be cool to do something like this as a hackathon project proof-of-concept; apparently I'm too late. Doing something like this for civil defense purposes would be pretty cool.
The funny bit is that it is almost exclusively referred to as "mIRC chat."
I don't know how extensively it is used elsewhere, but IRC is considered a primary communications method (and often the preferred vs. land lines, sat phones, and secure radios) for UAV pilots communicating with Air Traffic Control and the Control and Reporting Center.
I thought the funny bit was "Fire mission, POO".
A friend of mine worked in dis/connections support at an ISP+phone company. Proof-of-ownership was something they needed for any connection, and the acronym was used regularly throughout the workday. But she said on the phone, you'd sometimes forget and ask the customer things like "what poo can you give me?".
POO = Point of origin for indirect fire
I guess somebody has to be buying licenses for mIRC.
There's a bunch of these logs in the "afghanistan war logs" released by wikileaks.
The funny part is that they transmit fire missions through IRC instead of using a proper artillery data network. Of course you do that through plain old-fashioned radio when no data connection is available, but it you can transmit through IRC then you certainly have enough bandwidth for communicating through a better integrated system such as ATLAS (http://articles.janes.com/articles/Janes-C4I-Systems/ATLAS-a...)
Yet again we see that simple text is a preferable messaging layer for any purpose. I imagine that this gets the job done "well-enough", and anything more fancy would just be contractor life-support.
I'm afraid the artillery is controlled by a perl script using a few regexs to parse the input.