SkyGrabber How To

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the bad guys in Afghanistan and Iraq have cleverly figured out how to use a $29.95 software package called SkyGrabber to intercept video feeds from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

The SkyGrabber software was developed by a Russian company to pirate commercial satellite TV and Internet feeds, and the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan has evidently figured out how to use it to tap into UAV air-to-ground links.

The Journal story catapulted SkyGrabber into the fifth most popular search term on Google for most of today, and as a result the SkyGrabber Web site was unreachable due to overwhelming traffic.

But if you want to learn more about SkyGrabber, Philip Coyle III, senior advisor at the Center for Defense Information, told me he had found this nifty YouTube video that provides a basic tutorial on how to install the software.

Softpedia provides some excellent screen shots from the SkyGrabber software package, including this one, which shows a toggle into the C-band frequency, which is used by Predator UAVs for an air to ground downlink.

Be warned: Bad actors already have capitalized on the interest in SkyGrabber to distribute malware. I went to one site and immediately encountered one of those phony "Your computer is infected with a virus" messages and quickly backed out. Softpedia, a reliable site, is a safer place to download the software.