Electronic warfare ideas

So, Watch_Dogs.
Setting aside the rest of the game there was at least one very interesting element, the "hacking" skills.
Infinity wargame has somethng simmilar in combat hacking.
Also I've recently seen a report of an US army exercise in which the soldiers disable the nemy team drone using an electronic rifle(in reality an antenna and a small computer capable of emmitting whatever it is that disabled the drone attached to an airsoft rifle to aid aiming).

So what I was wondering is has anyone elese thought about this idea of electronic combat/combat hacking and what kind of things you think could be done.

I'm not really looking at too much realism but I'd still like it if the concept made sense.

For example the ability to raise one those road blocking posts or change the traffic lights
makes sense to me beacuse I believe those are the kinds of things that could/are remotely controlled from a central system in a city.

On the other hand somebody blowing upa transformer/gas pipe or disabling a power armor or someones cybernetic arm remotely makes little sense to me because i don't see why someone would make something like that remotely controllable.

Anyone interested in saying a bit about what kinds of things are possible in real world using hacking/electronic warfare or a bit about how its done is also welcome to type away.

Other urls found in this thread:

aviationweek.com/awin/air-force-considering-active-denial-non-lethal-weapon-c-130-use
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One idea I've had is that if the enemies have some kind of communication system and if you could in some manner access it it would be possible to send out a high-pitched sound that would make enemies with headpieces reveal themselves sp you would at least know which people are after you.

I know that its possible to send mass sms to people in certain areas I think it was used in syria by the government to scare/warn protesters before things went beyond such niceties.

I got the idea that you could send mass message to people claiming it was from the police containing pictures of your pursuers and stating they are criminals/terrorists and dangerous to create problems for them.

no one?

If the enemy is using some device enabling augmented reality(using as HUD for various information) you could bombard them with adware blocking their line of sight with pop-up ads and making their HUD useless

>Im in ur AoR, jammin ur stuffs.

Me too!

While for the sake of games the process of "hacking" is abstracted unless you want to say you somehow created a quantum decryptor that's brute-force hacking a salted and hashed MD5 password by accessing it via these ports and taking advantage of a flaw in the networking protocol that would have cost x company too much money to admit exist and left it in there without telling anyone.

For the most part though it depends on a lot of factors and frankly it makes more sense for actual hacking to be more a social affair as you snoop on people and figure that they are too lazy to make actual secure passwords so they use their birthdays, childrends birthdays, wedding aniversiry or whatever is typically easy to remember and will often write it down somewhere where others could find it if you look hard enough.

That and you have to take into account how much security a place could afford to put into place that's practical. A little office isn't going to have high end network security and you could probably get by plugging a key logger into a random workstation's usb port because who would ever look in the back when all they are concerned with is getting their head phones plugged in to listen to spotify? Then again a network closet would have a bit more love and attention with ports not being used turned off and managed switches so if you tried to plug in a cable where it's not suppose to and it senses it it won't allow you to communicate out to the rest of the network.

I know that real hacking is more about human idiocy then computer stuff.

I'm not that interested in the mechanics of gaining access, more with what you could do once you're in

Well, that depends on what it is. If your fucking around with traffic signals I'm pretty sure someone is going to jump on it pretty quickly and try to cut off access to it so I would say those would be one time use access that you'd have to be prepared to lose.

However, getting a hold of database and doing queries is another thing as long as you can cover up your tracks or make it look like one of the local admins are in there mucking about because linux for example will save a history of the commands you use and if the admins are savvy they will have ways of logging access and seeing if files have been viewed or modified.

Like I said not really interested in the technical side of things more in ideas about what could theoretically be accomplished.

Not database access stuff more cinematic stuff like the things in the game I mentioned.
Not really in for simulating real world hacking, more like lets say the act itself works what can you do
Lets say people are pretty much running scripts and know what they do but not really how its done, the other stuff is handled by actual expertsa which is not the focus here.

If that's the case then take example from movies like Hacker or Eagle Eye where your moving cranes around to create a path for your team mates to use and hinder pursuers.

I don't know what you're expecting to say .

Well these examples are kind of what I'm after

We call those Deus Ex Machina, you just have to justify them with hacking, voilĂ !

page 9 bump

>super hornets nesting in your barn
>you use complex ECM jamming technology to smoke them out
>you accidentally attract growlers who take over the super hornets' former nest

what's a farmer to do, Veeky Forums?

Can anyone give me a quick rundown of how they handle hacking in Infinity?

Remotely accessing transformers is actually somewhat plausible as a way of isolating failures in an emergency. If one substation goes down, you need a way to redistribute the load so it doesn't knock out three other substations.

Hacking is effectively the same as having a gun with an 8 inch range. Some figures have Hacking Devices (most units tend to have a hacker option), some have Defensive, Assault, EVO, or Killer versions of the device, that change what programs they gain access to. Programs tend to come in two varieties. Either you just spend the activation to activate the program (ones that turn you into a token, buff your allied drones, protect your heavy infantry from hackers, mess with their high tech sensors etc), or you roll off against the opponent same as shooting them. Only instead of using their Physical value to dodge, or their Ballistic value to shoot back, they use their Willpower (which tends to be used for their general technical skill level) to resist the attack. If they fail and are 'hit' by the hack, then they have to resist it's effect, with their Biotechnological Shielding stat (BTS). BTS also covers protection against viruses, poison, gas, etc. You do a BTS save against the strength of the attack. Same as an armour roll against a regular weapon hit, except it's against BTS rather than ARM. Fail, and you get affected by the program.

Programs can immobilise high tech stuff, mark targets for indirect fire, take control of enemy TAGs, or disrupt enemy deep strikes. Hackers also tend to have shielding programs that effectively work the same as shooting back, except you have a really good gun, stat wise.

The programs can vary stat wise in terms of the modifier they impose to either your, or your opponents WILL stat, they can increase the (effective) rate of fire of the attack, or vary the number they need to beat to avoid the attack.

So the Basilisk program gives the hacker 3 rolls, with a 'damage' of 13. The Carbonite program, on the other hand, gives you only two rolls, but they're at WIP +3, and any hit requires TWO saves, rather than just one.

Still alive, can't believe it.

Also as to answer just about every post so far I realize I'm totally ignoring the "how" of the matter and I'm not really interested in the how.

I was basically wondering if anyone thought about this and thought of any interesting ideas about what could be done through it.

Basically if you could through some magical means gain access to any sort of a system that could plausibly be remotely accessible what could you.
What kinds of things could be acccessed and what could you do once you're in.
Real world, near-future and SF doesn't matter.

For both programs, failing either puts you into the immobilised state, and in a reaction heavy game like infinity, that's almost the same as opening up the figure for a coup-de-grace.

Range wise, by default the range is 8 inches. But it doesn't need Line of Sight. You can extend this with Repeaters. Most drones have this special rule, and a few other special figures have it as well. Some armies get access to Markers, which are kinda like a grenade launcher, except it shoots repeaters. Some hackers get access to special slaved drones, that need to stay close to the hacker, but have the repeater rule. You can also use the enemies repeaters if you're close to one, but that imposes a penalty on your hacks.

Hacking is a pretty cheap addition to your army, but the real cost is in the activations you spend to hack. Do you hack their big scary guy to weaken him first, or just spend more activations shooting him? Hackers also can be something of a counter against certain tactics, buffing your drones, or acting like smoke grenades against figures with powerful sensors (de facto blinding typically powerful and expensive figures). Hackers also tend to be one of the figures that's permitted to Push the Button on whatever objective the game is dealing with at the time.

'Primitive' factions like Ariadna get almost no access to Hacking Devices, whereas a very sneaky faction like the Nomads not only gets slightly better stat for stat hackers, those hackers also get very easy access to repeaters. Even thought a basic Nomad hacker might be worse than a fancy hacker from another force, the Nomad list building process tends to make it near effortless to support your hacker without going out of your way. The Aliens get their own programs as well.

Thanks for the inpout.

But isn't the remote access done though some kind of a special system. I mean i know nothing about this but i always figured that something as important as a power distribution system isn't something that can be accessed through the internet regardless of any security measures in place.

Not the guy you were responding to but some things about the hacking abilities in Infinity always struck me as really unrealistic(yeah I know not that kind fo game SF etc. but just don't make sense).

like for example remotely messing with a drone kind of makes sense since it simply must be remotely accessible so theoretically it should be possible to mess with it but on the other hand affecting power armor/mecha is just strange. Why would you even have that option?

Or giving buffs to your troops. How would that even work?

Somewhat related id a story I've read about a c130 gunship loaded with a non-lethal weapon:

aviationweek.com/awin/air-force-considering-active-denial-non-lethal-weapon-c-130-use

Taking that a step further imagine a city/nation ruled by a unpopular government with violent riots and clashes with the police happening often.
The people in charge could have one of the non-lethal c130 gunships in the air circling around.
Lets say it has one of those theoretically non lethal microwave weapons, maybe the bofors cannon is still present but its loaded with some kind of airburst teargas round, maybe it could have rounds containing something similar to Rhino Snot(to make avenues of advance a slippery inaccessible mess).
It would also be loaded with surveillance eqipment capable of identifying rioters to be picked up afterwards and listening into communications perhaps it could also fire upon them with rounds filled with something similar to the paint used mark the bills so they could be easily picked out of the crowd.

>Messing with armour or mocha
Because the armour is still heavily connected into the tactical battlenet, and unlike the obnoxious things you can do to the higher level functions, the fact remains is that the power armour is heavily computerised, and you can brick that computer, at least temporarily. Soldiers in Infinity have a lot of electronic support.

Ditto for mecha. Now, the thing is, both of those units tend to have a fairly strong BTS score by default. It's actually quite hard to hack a TAG, and a heavy infantry with a defending hacker is quite a challenging target relative to a lone drone. It's also worth mentioning that the HI can shake the effects.
>buffs to your troops
Well, the buffs tend to make sense in context. Cybermask allows you to enter the lower stage of the Impersonation skill. It's an easy check to break that concealment, but you can't shoot them until you do. Good for surprise attacks in the short term, won't hold up under scrutiny. In practise, I imagine this means messing with their IFF decoders, or adding them to the enemies tactical map as a friendly, or spoofing voice signals to make it seem like that guy over there is a friendly.
Buffing the friendly drones gives them either a higher rate of fire when they react, which is represented by the hacker giving the drone a more precise and controlled access to the tactical net's data, and in a sense, micromanaging the drone more rather than just letting it do it's own thing. Another option might be implying that the hacker is effectively prioritising that drone for cloud processing resources. The other buff is giving it the Marksmanship skill, which kills rather than wounds targets, and negates cover bonuses. Pretty much the same rationale applies there.

There's also controlled jump, which makes your paratropping/drop podding troops more accurate when they land, which is a no brainer. The hacker provides them with improved telemetry/a better beacon for a safer landing.

I concede that everything is connected to the battle net but I still see the masking and making yourself harder to hit as somewhat plausible(I envision this as the enemy having a sort of an integrated system of sensors feeding them data form sources other then the suits own for purposes of enemy position and assisted aiming so there must be some way to mess with the connection between them and feed them false info)

The messing with the higher level functions never made sense to me but I guess your explanation about sort of making the whole system lockup makes sense.

About the buffs I've heard these explanations before but the one about giving them better access never made sense to me but your idea about prioritising cloud computing access is a pretty good explanation.

I could add that it could be that everybody involved may have something like jammer to counteract all the assisted aiming and other system so it could be that you're sometimes counter-counterjamming.

Nice to see someone other than me has given this some thought.

Do you have any other ideas about what abilities a "combat hacker" may have in an integrated future battlefield or perhaps in a near future city such as the one in Watch_Dogs

WELL. Things that people have actually done IRL with hacking that are a little spooky:

- Bricked cars mid-drive. If you do this while someone is say, out on a hunting trip, they die of thirst. Flawless hands off assassination, especially if you can brick all their other networked devices, since the heat will cook said devices memory units beyond any forensic recovery.

- Increased the velocity of motors in a manufacturing plant until it caused heat fractures and exploded all the equipment. This is actually a really common one.

- Unlock and open the doors of an enemy APC or tank when you troops charge it. This is purely theoretical one, and honestly not even very useful since it relies on day zero exploits deliberately placed by the US military in several exports, but if you got a hold of the technique somehow I suppose it would be a good way to molotov enemy mans EVEN HARDER.

- Look up crew manifests to identify which enemy personnel are on duty and accordingly socially engineer them in real time by looking their personal info up online.

- Actually assuming direct control of enemy drone aircraft. This is mainly an issue with older models at the moment, people demonstrated it could be done to Predators for instance a couple of years back.

>On the other hand somebody blowing upa transformer/gas pipe

Didn't the US blow up a gas or oil pipeline in Russia or something by targeting the computer system that regulates the thing to keep it from blowing up with a cyberweapon?


>disabling a power armor or someones cybernetic arm remotely makes little sense to me because i don't see why someone would make something like that remotely controllable.

The justification given for cybernetics is that the software that translates brain commands into machine commands the augment can interpret gets the occasional firmware update. That said, every setting that has that explanation also has an addendum that basically no one opens their augments to a network outside of safe zones like their doctor's office or a secured location at the company that paid for their augment.

Now were I to be a bit more speculative, based on what I've seen from second hand experience with my friend's AI research, I would expect the following:

Rather than manually manipulating shit in real time, you would probably have an AI assistant, who runs both the literal and figurative swarm optimisation on the tasks you declare. Things to remember: If you have the computing power to hack ONE self-driving car, you probably have the computing power to hack several at once.

Image recognition is now increasingly more accurate and computationally 'compact', especially if the human operator tells the AI where its target is initially and it tracks them from there.

This means you have CCTV 'radar' for adversaries, and in fact your AI can probably tell your enemies apart from a crowd by noting the disruption from regular foot traffic patterns that stem from paying attention to a moving target.

At this point, it will commandeer a swarm of self-driving cars and rain them upon your poor non-AI assisted enemies.

As far as I can tell, there is nothing, and I mean NOTHING in an urban environment remotely as useful to a combat hacker as the plethora of self-driven cars. Even indoors, the AI on those things are going to be good enough to seek and destroy up fucking stairs if the car can physically fit. And they have no self-preservation instinct.

There's also all the quadrotor drones flying around, which aren't going to kill anyone but can badly cut up your face and hit kinda hard, the perfect distraction in the 5 to 10 seconds leading up to hitting the target with a self-driving car.

Having turnstiles refuse to let people pass has NOTHING on nearly ubiquitous swarms of potentially self-guided projectiles.

The cars thing I have heard about I think it was the wustion of remotely accessing the LoJack system(if I got the name right) on rental cars.

the factory thing if new to me except if you're referring to Stuxnet.

If I understand this one correctly this is a vulnerability that was made in purpose in case US had to fight the peopl it sold the weapons to?
That's sneaky and dishonest on whole new level, not that I'm surprised considering international politics being what they are.

I'm not sure I understnad te social engineering entry, do you mean you could threaten them, confuse them and demoralize them with knowledge obtained?

This one I've heard of apparently the Iranians hijacked an US drone this way.


Interesting all around thank you

Specialized is expensive; what you'd probably find is a standard network server that's configured to ignore any connections from outside a specific address range.
For most purposes that's good enough, because you can't see it on network scans if it doesn't respond to connections, but it has to accept connections from somewhere, and chances are the main office is nowhere near as secure.
Most likely the office has a guest wifi with a weak password, in which case you could get onto the whitelist by sitting outside with a laptop and using a password cracker to connect. Obviously there are more steps to get into the transformer itself, but it's at least plausible.

>If I understand this one correctly this is a vulnerability that was made in purpose in case US had to fight the peopl it sold the weapons to?

Yes. Like, don't get me wrong its not a GOOD backdoor. Its got nothing on just blowing the thing up, and its very rare indeed that the US are the ones whose infantry need to carjack an enemy armored division, but its there.

I imagine Russian avionics probably have a few tricks installed in the event that they ever find themselves fighting their customers.

>do you mean you could threaten them, confuse them and demoralize them with knowledge obtained?
Confuse them mostly.

Quadrotors also make excellent signal repeaters in settings with heavy use of mesh networks. Having an extra node to bounce your signal off of that can operate freely in a 3d environment is almost as valuable to a combat hacker as being able to fly themselves.

Didn't know about the pipeline thing, thanks. but that seems more like the case of "you disable the system and it eventually blows up" than "click-boom" approach.

On ten second point that is kind of my problem with the idea even if you take fimware thing into account(good idea never htought of that, thanks) I find it far more likely that would be done through something like connecting with a cable or something that you pretty much had to push against a device to prevent messing with it.
Although that gives me idea about a close combat guy who has these short range transmitters on his fists that transmit scrambling code to enemy cyberware.

Y'all should check out Bodacious Space Pirates. It does this very well.

Damn thats so calculated and dishonest it looks like something from SF or anime, Just...

Social engineering stuff is an intresting idea, thanks.

Though if you could gain access to enemy communications I guess you could for example make them belive their other patrol has been attacked via simulated recording to draw them into an ambush

Another reason augments might be wireless-enabled is to send tactical and maintenance data back to someone. If you're hit or something goes wrong (even something the soldier in question wouldn't notice immediately), someone on the other end will immediately know what's wrong. Even then, in a dedicated combat zone, those connections would probably have constant oversight from a cybersecurity specialist specifically to make sure the communications are kept secure.

This kind of security ensures that while hacking a person's augments is a devastating and possibly fatal blow to them, it's coupled with the kind of difficulty making that kind of blow should carry.

>I envision this as the enemy having a sort of an integrated system of sensors feeding them data form sources other then the suits own for purposes of enemy position and assisted aiming so there must be some way to mess with the connection between them and feed them false info
Explicitly the case. There's this really excellent fluff piece in Campaign Paradiso where about 3/8ths of a second after a hidden sniper opens fire on an armoured column, the entire system kicks in. Targeting data, maintenance requests, intel briefings and cross-correlations, initial processing for an airborne strike, etc. Expert systems everywhere.

>whole system lock up
Hell, turning on the night vision mode during the day, turning the suit to power save mode, or shifting the entire HUD graphic into military grade Nomad furry pornography would do the job. It's also strongly implied that there's a DNI component to most power armour and TAGs. Now, I can imagine that there's buffering systems up the wazoo, but the fluff explicitly mentions that there's a sort of holistic experience simulation when it comes to the feedback. It tires the users out mentally more rapidly, but the precision of control is worth the tradeoff, particularly with the cocktail of anti-fatigue and focus drugs they feed into the TAG control pods. Even fucking with the sensitivity of that system, or flooding it with information for a few moments could critically distract the user.

Yeah the self driving cars thing is practically a WMD.

Hell, even in reality the idea of streets filled with those kind of scares me protective measures be damned.

>better access
I can't help but remember an anecdote about WW2. German batteries tended to have their own dedicated spotters, whereas the Americans and the British tended to have the spotters the servants of the entire system. In the latter case, it mean that the army could use it's artillery far more efficiently, but in the former case, one specific battery got a bit of a leg up, time wise, because the targeting data didn't need to feed through a fire direction control centre. I wonder if something similar might apply here with the kill chain. You don't get second hand reports, that drone gets a direct feed from an overhead satellite and a direct link to nearby suit cameras, sort of thing.
>jammer
That's an excellent point actually, improved ECCM would have a huge impact if modern combat is anything to go by in terms of Pk.

Simply being an administrator for an information nexus would be a powerful advantage. Something like an RTS view of sorts would have huge implications for the OODA loop, even if you had to advise a second person, or parse the data into something concise and readable. Managing whatever drone network you had might be another part of it, and prioritising network resources might be another, if you assume that anything within range is going to have the shit hacked out of it automatically. I can see combat hackers in a way being the radiomen of the future. They form the connection between the warehouse full of siege hackers back at the base, and the actual target. As far as the combat hacker is concerned, there's just a bar filling, but in the same way that a first LT can direct a titanic amount of artillery or aerial firepower, the combat hacker can prioritise targets and methods, and enact local mission goals with the assistance of higher order resources, wether that's time on recon satellites, feeding locally gained signal intelligence back into the network, or maintaining the logistics network like a sort of real time administrator.

Oh Id didn't envision the hacking thing be done like movie hacking by mashing the keyboard as you're doing it.
More like running scripts, going through known vulnerabilities/exploits and tings like that to achieve goal. the diea about using an AI at your disposal to do the heavy lifting for you faster than you ever could is interesting though, thanks.

Huh didn't know that.
So even such thigs are at least borderline plausible(as in not hacking a brick wall)

Most of hacking is about carefully picking at the target until a vulnerability exposes itself. But with military systems, and mid-combat, none of that is particularly feasible for a single guy in a trench somewhere. If anything, the hacker would be kinda like a mass 'debuff' beacon, with the before mentioned AI just blasting a more sophisticated version of a dictionary attacks at everything nearby.

I have difficulty thinking about how all that would work. If there are some weaknesses, how does that army even function? Sure, there's ECM and ECCM, but if you can turn off power armour, or jam a missile or something, what's stopping you from just consistently doing that? It'll work on a huge range of systems, with probably critical results. Or you don't know the specific, highly technical multi-stage exploitation that lets you inject code at just the right spot, and your combat hacker is basically useless.

Kinda seems like hacking is more of a psyops and spooks game than a military one. Military hackers would be more like EW and Intelligence personal than digital snipers.

Supervision and maintenance is a given but I see that as a one way street. i understnd why you should send data to some central location but not why they should be able to mess with your cybernetics.

The military's actually transitioning to a COTS based system as it stands. Time was, you had some hellaciously well optimised code running on a device with the power of a potato clock. These days, it's a Linux distro running a C++ program. It's not optimised, but it doesn't have to be because you're using a $5k setup rather than a $500k custom tooled setup. That means you have a vastly increased amount of grunt for network centric warfare and stuff like BMD, which wasn't possible before, but it also opens up the possibility that the difference between regular civilian systems and military ones won't be nearly as dramatic.

You like using HUDs and radar systems in FPS/RTS games? Exactly the same process. You send sense data IN, and they send crunched numbers back. They send the signal to your personal computer, which feeds it into your cybernetic vision system. You've got 50 drone within a 1km radius, and so you only have 2 guys driving each tank, Warthunder style, because you don't need a dedicated commander to keep his eyes open, because it's so damn easy to keep an eye on things with all that context sensitive information getting fed in. The driver has DNI-sent AR icons directing them, and there's no actual physical joystick/wheel systems needed to aim the tank gun, and it's easy to use because the enemy have big red marks over them, along with distributed data systems recording and telling everyone how long it's been since they last fired, relevant damage, and vehicle make and model, along with computed likely objectives and movement patterns. There's data coming back to you. That might not go directly to your systems, but it's certainly going into Your System. And that opens up everything. They gain access to this particular subroutine, which can inject code into that one, which whitelists it for a third section, which can simulate a damage related malfunction of a third system which activates the fire suppression system inside the cabin and asphyxiates everyone with halon.

That's why flash is such a pig. Yes, it's just the flash program screwing up and being badly coded, but that's a foot in the door. Cybernetics are connected to one thing, which are connected to others. That's the entire point of cybernetics.

So cost saving that could potentially cost them dearly?

What's BMD(I'm guessing you don't mean the IFV)?

I know that in real life even one day in networked battlefield enviroment if there is electronic warfare similar to this it will work completely differently.

l I never thought of the idea of a combat hacker character as something realistic, just damn fun concept to have in a game.

You know what's expensive? A CBG that just had the fuck blown out of it because it's next gen missiles didn't have an effective enough kill chain to neutralise the wave of supersonic anti-shipping missiles inbound for it.

We built tanks, and now we have to worry about POL and spare parts convoys getting attacked. We used to be able to just loot food from whatever locals we were running over at the time, but now we need to ship stuff in from the mother country, because what we need is far too complex to loot from farmhouses. It's a pain, and it's not something Napoleon had to deal with as such, but mechanised warfare was still the better option.

In this case, the code and IT systems might be a bit less artisnal, but the resources gained more than make up for that. I have a huge amount of respect for the big damn heroes that made Apollo 11 work using devices that my tamagotchi could outmuscle, but the technology we use now has so many more advantages that it'd be silly to hold back.

It also means we can have a slightly larger pool of developers, in a way. Which is funny, because usually military tech gets increasingly specialised with time. You can't get Detroit Motor Works to build MBTs within 4 months, in this day and age, but with the way things are going military IT wise, we might just start seeing the civilian and military sectors converging, particularly with the military sector having the grunt and ubiquity of network resources available to make use of the various civilian sector innovation's we've taken for granted.

So, things are different, but ultimately much better.

Well I did kind of see the combat hacker as someone more or less running programs/scripts written beforehand.
Something similar to what you're describing he would just be the guy on the ground picking what to do an to whom, while others would be in charge of the "how" part of making it happen. It could be him running other peoples rpograms or communicating with poeple back at the base and telling them that this or that needs to be done.

Ballistic Missile Defense. IE, that thing where a moving object needs to fire a tiny, semi-guided object to hit another object that's moving at mach 5 in an erratic fashion, and the whole thing is over within 2 minutes. Computerised doesn't even begin to explain the systems in place.

Datalinking in general's a big thing. Say, one plane detects the missile, which then shares the data with another ship, which paints the missile with it's own radar, but another ship 50km away fires an anti-missile missile at the original anti-ship missile, while an AWACS plane calculates from windblown farts the original location of the sensor that detected your guys in the first place, and automatically fires a cruise missile at it that can take advantage of local topography to avoid another (divined out of scant data) defence system.
Oh, I agree. It's a legitimate attempt at a modern version of the Mage archetype. Or possibly the rogue. It kinda works for something like Watchdogs, or Deus Ex, when it's all a bit more covert and individual. Armies, however, mean that almost certainly a think tank has considered what you're about to do, and has spend the last 15 years thinking about how to stop you.

The increasing precision of drop pods never made sense to me. Why not just feed them the good data immediately

Maybe it could be the question of the pod needing complex calculations and those being done in a cloud computing manner so it would all be just prioritizing the pods request for processing power?

Because the good data is being fucked with by of enemy operational-scale hackers.
>complex calculations
I'm thinking that by the time we have drop pods, getting them basically down in one piece isn't the trick. Evading enemy defences is. Drop troop support might well involve messing with enemy sensors so that your pod can come down the quick way, rather than the safe way.

From what i read about actual miltary networking systems the idea is amazing an will one day become reality but these days maintaining a reliable network in the field is like trying to get wifi through a building worth of brick walls.

Well the original idea did come from Watch Dogs and the fact that the idea is more suitable to small operations is not really a problem if you tinka bout it because thats pretty much what roleplaying is mostly about, not grand warfare.

I talked about infinity because that is the only other place where I've seen combat hacking, also the scale of the game and decription of various factions summons in my mind an image far less professional then modern warfare that you're referring to (more like warbands or mercs than a real army if you will)

Well, naval systems have a lot of advantages. Big ships, lots of power, no problem with managing big fixed antennae that have to be humvee-portable, and the ocean surface doesn't have a lot of bumps in it. Land operations are a completely different bucket of fish. 5 ships are one thing, 15 thousand infantry spread across a dozen different combat groups and totally different roles and equipment types another thing entirely.

I'm aware that they have their resons, i made the comment related to what you said earlier how civilian systems are not really designed with security in mind as much as dedicated military systems are

So more like pretending to be one of the sources and feeding them wrong data then directly accessing them and controlling stuff?

Oh yeah, that's the nature of Infinity to a T. In many respects it's like a million border skirmishes, if not flat out Shadowrun style operations.

I think it'll probably help if we think of hacking as being something of a means to an end, rather than an archetype like Wizard. Rogues use mechanics like a hacker uses electronics, but picking locks and filching keys aren't what a rogue's about so much as it is the intelligent application of those skills, and a million others to get things done. Hacking should have the same perception.

Of course, in Infinity hackers for the most part tend to be grafted onto existing units. You can have Heavy Infantry hackers, if you like. It's an addition to a role, a permutation, not really a gimmick on it's own.

Even in Watchdogs, Aiden's a lot more than just a guy with a magic lock pick.

What I read was referng to land based networks and how the strykers were supposed to form a network sharing all kinds of intel among the combatants. In the end I got the impression that the troops found the thing very useful when it worked but it usually didn't because maintaining a stable network in such conditions is real hard.

Ah, I took 'potentially cost them dearly' as a dire prediction that they were in the process of potentially cutting their own throats.
Civilian systems aren't designed with security being as high on the list of priorities, but much I that is organisational prioritisation. They're using civilian tech, but I suspect the security implications can be minimised with good implementation.
That kind of thing, yeah. And of course you can de-facto control them with the right data. You don't need to control their engine if you can just give them the wrong movement waypoint. Don't need to turn off their cameras if you can just direct their attention in the wrong direction at just the right moment.

And that's BEFORE OPFOR starts catching up and sticking selective jammers on everything.

Maybe in this enviroment combat hacking is simply something that is part of normal operations for everyone involved so everey class would utilize it to some extent with the actual hacker being like a wizard among them with really spectacular abilities in that regard.

Some fighter might have an AI attached to a EW unit messing with other peoples targetting and protecting their own and similar things.

Also what I mentioned earlier.
Lets say there is a need to update the firmware on someones cybernetics, the remote access is s dangerous option but to avoid makin ports of the device there is a factory installed contact connection where you must press the part to a device in order to connect to it. This way two guys fist fighting might involve their EW systems directing attacks tying to scramble the others electronics when they make contact.

I heard that there were problems with drone controlling losing conatct with the drone due to how much frequency hogging there is on a modern battlefield due to a massive increase in networks and communications.
One can only imagine what could happen when people are actually trying to block your signal.

That may have been the case once, but these days security is everyone's problem. Data leaks don't physically hurt anyone but they can cost a huge amount of money.

No i really didn't mean it like that. I am aware that the army sometimes insists on having special military grade everything even when it isn't necessary.

I just think in a setting such as the ones discussed here it could be one of the explanations for why you can access protected military systems(as in they weren't designed to be such from the ground up and somebody found a hole they neglected to patch)

Yeah, even in your average wireless office you have loss in performance as a result of that. Physics is a bitch in certain respects, even if frequency reservation and multiplexing technology is improving a lot. Highly directly signals have shown some promise, though, and stealth technology for jet fighters is starting to make use of it. That's more about concealing your emissions from enemy sensors than about frequency EM spectrum saturation, but there might be some potential as the technology matures.
That's a pretty safe bet. Particularly in cyberpunk systems where 'it cost too much and my boss wouldn't OK it' is always a plausible reason for erratically implemented security.

I know that I just always kind of assumed that in an army system some things that are integrated into civvy system for convenience simply wouldn't exist.
Like something wouldn't be designed to be accessible from the outside at all and you had to physically go somewhere and flip a switch.

A stupid example but I hope you get what I'm going for.

To sidestep a little bit when they say thata fighter/bomber is using electronic warfare what is it doing exactly?

I mean how does it work, is it just sending out a wave that interferes with another wave or...

Also in a cyberpunk setting corporations don't have an actual professional army and are probably more slack in maintaining security

>This one I've heard of apparently the Iranians hijacked an US drone this way.

The Iranians claimed they hacked a drone but it's likely that the drone was brought down through a combination of Iranian jamming and an error in the inertial guidance system.

Well the hacking I was referring really was them jamming the signal and then the drone doing what was programmed to do in case of loss of contact which is to say attempting to land.

I'm pretty sure its possible to automatically call everyone in a given area if you have access of their service provider.

Calling everyone in a given area at once would create a cacophony of ringtones which would surely disorient and distract anyone trying to pursue you .

A heap of things. It could be jamming, it could be sniffing various frequencies to find things, it could be using enemy radar to direct weapons, it could be part of an array of sensors that are gathered together and turned into something useful in a local AWACS bird.

The simplest answer would be that the F/A craft in question has a few jammers that it's switched on while it's making it's attack runs. And while that wave might not interfere with another wave exactly, it has a comparable effect of having 3 guys screaming different songs at different pitches and speeds, while you're trying to hear the footsteps of the guy creeping up on you so you can shoot him.

Wasn't that the one /k/ deduced had had some sort of 'unfortunate' malfunction and landed in Iran at about the same time the Stuxnet virus was introduced into their systems? No idea if that was true or not, but considering a top secret US drone falling into your hands would be certainly something you'd want to research, and the timing of everything involved...

Yeah, but within a week that switch would probably be taped to a given setting by some bored E-2 that was sick of making the trip every time they needed it, or bypassed totally by a W-4 who was running some sort of scheme, neither of which telling their commanding officers.

Security is the enemy of accessibility, and military types tend to have a lot of hoops to jump through already.

Wasn't it pretty much confirmed that Stuxnet was brought into the uranium centrifuge facility on an USB stick by someone and plugged in?

I'm aware that army isn't the monolithic everything by the rules force that the movies make it out to be(I read somewhere that one of the things that helped the British crack the enigma machine was that luftwaffe personnel was kind of slacking in terms of ordered key changing procedures which helped them deciphering)

but still, I believe a specially designed system would be to a degree safer then a commercial one.

Never believe anything from /k/ about military matters without verifying it first. Stuxnet first appeared about a year before the drone incident. Even so, why would you load malware designed to interrupt specific industrial processes on something that would be carted back to military intelligence and R&D?

maybe not to a significant enough degree to warrant keeping them but still

So today's EW consists of making a lot of noise so the enmy can't detect the noise he's looking for?

I read in some article years back that Israeli jets on their wy to bombing something in Syria(that while there was still a Syria) used their EW to pretty much take over Syrian air defense radars showing them false aircraft sightings, how does that work?

>Never believe anything from /k/ about military matters without verifying it first
I didn't. But it's a fun idea, and dovetails nicely. Like a GoT theory.
I haven't heard anything on that sort of specific one way or another. I've heard speculation that a double agent might have done it with a USB stick as the original introduction vector, but considering the environment and the very media-heavy nature of the story, I wouldn't trust anything much, particularly when there's both conspiracy, and almost certainly unofficial official agendas in play. A double agent sounds like a really good justification to further purge your valuable nuclear scientists, which is a win for Stuxnet's designers.
That's broadly true, but I suspect that in previous ages where hacking was something of a fantasy for another decade, the optimisation was more about performance from primitive, but reliable electronics than about counter-intrusion as such.

In most cases the military version of a commercial system is very different than the civilian version.

Well since the development of anything military takes forfuckingever I believe that by the end you may end up with something super-stable and safe(or not, but for the sake of the argument lets say that you do) but it's pretty much a given that the hardware will be generations behind what you have as a civilian

Well, jamming does, which is a keystone of EW the world over, historically and today.
Part of EW is also remaining concealed. Modern radar systems can conceal their presence because they used sophisticated electronics to pulse a number of different frequencies and lengths of signal to build up a picture of what's going on. Very hard to detect, because it blends in with local noise more easily. Directed data links also mean that you can fire a missile with another plane's radar, so even if you know that SOMETHING is out there pinging you, it might not be the thing that's shooting at you, even if that hidden thing has the accuracy of a fully guided system.
>false aircraft
There's a lot getting talked about these days about decoys. Massive overwhelming missile and aircraft strikes that are very difficult to effectively engage because as far as the IADS is concerned, there's 3 times as many aircraft coming in as there really is. And if you fire your own SAMs at it, you reveal them for immediate targeting. That's EW as well. If they're emitting radar signals, or communications signals, you can use those to target your own attacks.

And what happened in Syria would match the use of jamming. Jamming can effectively white out less advanced radar systems. When you're getting a hundred hits, finding the real plane is a very difficult job. And if you're going to bomb a ground target, and your navigation system is up to the task, the issues a jammer-heavy environment present are less pronounced, so you might as well crank up the huge jammers on AWACS planes and prevent them from spotting you in time.

Wasn't the whole point of the COTS idea to use civilian systems to save time and money spent developing their own by the time they're done inevitably obsolete systems?

False aircraft sightings would be decoys, not jamming.

Yeah, but because these days that system is less physically constrained, you have a lot more wiggle room. Updates and upgrades are a lot easier now that you don't have to rebuild the electronics of a plane from scratch. Before it was the equivalent of say, totally switching from Windows to MacOS. These days it's more like upgrading from Windows 7 to 10. That is to say, not without issues, but fundamentally a lot more accomplishable because there's no reinvention of the wheel from a rederivation of physics every time. At least, that's the theory.

There was some experiment with miniature drones dispersed from a fighters flare launcher that would act as decoys and would extend the signal network.

Its what I read and it confused me I understand having a drone pretending to be a fighter but how would this work?

MALDs, yeah. Air defence saturation the smart way. Blowing up a target used to take a dozen different aircraft types and 2 carriers worth of planes. In days to come we might well be able to drop that down by a huge degree. Multirole is really starting to mean something.

So is jamming itself basically emitting waves similar to the ones that would be produce if radar wave were reflected of an aircraft.

It's about piggybacking on commercial stuff to cut costs and development time, yes, but you have to realize that military equipment has to hold to completely different standards and lifecycles. Military systems are geared towards a single purpose and long-term usage where reliability and security are the overriding concerns. With a civilian system you can dump an unstable, buggy product on the market then patch it two months later followed by weekly updates for the next two months to fix issues the patch created. You don't get to do that with military stuff.

It's basically a little missile. You can strap 2-4 of them onto say, a Super Hornet, no problem. The specifics are probably classified all to hell and back, but they have features on them that make them burn as hot, and shine as bright on radar to make them seem about the same size, speed, and flight patterns as actual aircraft. Enemy air defences detect them, and sees 5 aircraft flying on. Only 1 is real, but you have to shoot at something or else the other guy completes his mission.
It can be. Or it can be the same sorts of noises as say, atmospheric noise. Anything that makes it harder to figuring out exactly where you are. Jamming isn't stealthy. At all. But if they can't ID which blip you are, that's a win. EM signals also change based on direction, speed, atmosphere, etc. So even if they can detect a 'radar' signal, it might just be a type of jamming. The signal matches a given sort of fighter going a certain direction, but its actually an adjusted signal from a fighter going in a totally different direction, but the signal emitter's been fiddled with so that it looks like something else.

The decoys work in the opposite direction as most EW. They're designed to send out returns to make the enemy radar think they're a real plane.

For some really next level shit, they're developing decoys that not only spoof other planes, but can also switch to jamming radar instead. And they're trying to give them small explosive payloads so they can make suicide runs at enemy positions.

Also, a lot of aircraft are already hard enough to spot at certain distances, so it can be a case of misrepresenting your exact position, and you cruise through untargeted. A shell game. The ball isn't in any of the cups. That's what the F-35 and F-22 can do. And modern datelinking means that all this electronic wash and not using your own radar for actual radar isn't as big a deal, because you have a mate quietly sitting a few K's off, that knows the jamming algorithm you're using, so the jamming doesn't affect him, and he's listening for the electronic sound that a SAM radar makes, with his finger on the trigger. Remember that even a missile having a few seconds of confusion can throw it totally off course. That's what flares and chaff are for, after all.

It does seem to be something that could do a whole lot of good against a proper air defense(something that the air force hasn't dealt with in years).

I tehy get it to work right. Its only valid if the drones can function autonomously but that has been the idea ever since Predator and they still have ground teams flying the drones from halfway around the globe

>autonomously
It's not that hard to get them autonomous ENOUGH. Strike fighters usually don't exactly wiggle about much when they're inbound on a target, and anti shipping missiles and stuff like tomahawks already do plenty as far as maundering about like a fighter's concerned. AS missiles already wiggle about at the end of their run to dodge CIWS fire. They're not asking for synchronised formation flying, after all.

I guess that's true.

But proper autonomous flying is still impossible from what I've read.

GPS waypointing and INS go a long way. Datalinking also means that the MALDs can have their flight path updated by AWACS or the plane that launched them. The use of ground teams controlling drones is more a matter of different missions and methods of operation. If you're trying to collect intel and need to be able to respond immediately to changes in the environment then you're going to want a ground controller who can react as needed. If you're pretending to be a plane and your only point is to mess with air defense systems with no concern if you get shot down or crash then you don't need to be very sophisticated.