A Patriot missile system stationed in Turkey by the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) was allegedly hacked by a remote source, according
to reports. German magazine Behörden Spiegel said
this week that the hacked missile system is owned and operated by the
German Army. It was deployed along the Turkish-Syrian border in early
2013, after Ankara requested NATO assistance in protecting its territory
from a possible spillover of the civil war in neighboring Syria.
The Patriot surface-to-air missile system
was initially built for the United States Army by American defense
contractor Raytheon in the 1980s, but has since been sold to many of
Washington’s NATO allies, including Germany. The Patriot system consists
of stand-alone batteries, each composed of six launchers and two
radars. The radars, which are aimed at spotting and targeting incoming
missiles, communicate with the launchers via a computer system. The
latter was hijacked for a brief period of time by an unidentified
hacker, said Behörden Spiegel, adding that the perpetrators of
the electronic attack managed to get the missile system to “perform
inexplicable commands”. The magazine gave no further details.
Access to the Patriot missile system
could theoretically be gained through the computer link that connects
the missiles with the battery’s control system, or through the computer
chip that guides the missiles once they are launched. Hacking any one of
these nodes could potentially allow a perpetrator to disable the
system’s interception capabilities by disorienting its radars.
Alternatively, a hacker could hypothetically prompt the system to fire
its missiles at an unauthorized target. According to Behörden Spiegel,
the attack on the missile system could not have come about by accident;
it was a concentrated effort aimed at either taking control of the
missiles or compromising the battery’s operating system. Moreover, the
sophisticated nature of such an attack on a well-protected military
system presupposes the availability of infrastructural and monetary
resources that only nation-states possess, said the magazine.
Shortly after the Behörden Spiegel
article was published, the German Federal Ministry of Defense denied
that Patriot missile systems under its command could be hacked. A
Ministry spokesman told German newspaper Die Welt that the Ministry was not aware of any such incident having taken place in Turkey or elsewhere
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