Plane-tracking site Flight Radar 24 DDoSed... just as drones spotted buzzing over Azerbaijan and Armenia Popular plane-tracking website Flight Radar 24 has been the victim of multiple DDoS attacks over the past few days – and though the site's operators haven't attributed blame, some have wondered if a regional conflict may have been the cause. Flight Radar 24, as its name suggests, is a website for the live tracking of air …
Single mastermind of the attacks is our interpretation..................
It's Turkey
trying out the whole Imperial expansionist bollox around a century too late, which would put it bang on the button for the actual time line IN Turkey :o)
Lovely country, the people fantastic, had a property there for years, never any issue at all, but the regimes attempts to bring both religion into the state, and make Turkey appear 'relevant' are making for strange bed fellows
Turkey is a large country, Russia is a really big neighbour, and even though they are cosying up to the Russian military markets, they still want to stir the pot as it were in the region, anything that causes instability there, is going to be considered good for Turkey, as they can then be seen as the 'good' guys, trying to settle everything down
check out their attempts in Syria, nothing to do with helping Syrian's, everything to do with continuing the extermination of the Kurds
and then there is their new found fascination in the eastern Med, trying to make out that the seabed really needs mapping, and that they really need to do that bit right next to Cyprus in great detail ..........
just an odd time for them to be doing so many weird things, that were not part of their outlook, even ten years back
Turkey has always had this military mindset, was one reason why all civilian flights in and out came at night, so you couldn't see the revetments and all the other military personnel there, they class the BEACHES as a military area, have armed guards patrolling them, we shared mini buses with heavily armed patrols on occasion, some thing you never seen in Northern Ireland for example
so yea - TL/DR
it's Turkey :o)
"Open source researchers claim to have picked up the live flight tracks of drones over Armenia and Azerbaijan"
Would anyone using an unmanned aircraft for something nasty leave the transponder (which Flight Radar depends on, despite the name - I think) switched on?
According to the web site, Flightradar24 combines data from several data sources including ADS-B, MLAT and radar data. It seems they are able to track certain military traffic, but not all. They key here is the ADSB (and latterly MLAT) coverage - much of this is provided by hobbyists such as myself (I'm with Flightaware) who host cheap ADSB receivers often using Raspberry Pi and continually send data to a central hub. It would be practically impossible to take all those down so DDoS'ing the central site makes sense.
Doesn't your client buffer data if the site is down?
I can think of a few reasons why you would want to go on a military jolly with your transponder on, but this theory doesn't compute:
* Surprise factor? The air navigation services in the area concerned do not rely on FR24 (duh!) but on (usually) their own infrastructure. In addition, militaries also keep their own independent watch, with detection (but not traffic management) capabilities that exceed those of the civilian service. There is both redundancy and procedures to deal with outages, aside from things being (usually) adequately protected to start with. So no surprise factor.
* Deniability? Everyone who collects data is still collecting it. If it's not uploaded straight away it'll just get uploaded a bit later, but you're still being recorded as it were.
Can't see how this makes sense.
... we've been using FR to monitor fire fighting aircraft. It's kind of handy to know when a DC10 is going to buzz proceedings at 200 feet when loading already skittish critters into trailers ... The outage was more than mildly annoying, but radios picked up most of the slack.
Russia supports Armenia and sells arms to Armenia and Azerbaijan. Turkey supports Azerbaijan and supplies it with arms (did anyone have any debate about banning drones in conflicts?) and to spite the Russians. France supports Armenia against Turkey because of Libya, genocide of Armenians 100 years ago, and some vague French interests in east Mediterranean (oil in Libya and gas off Cyprus, etc.). Russia supports Turkey against the Kurds in Syria, and Turkey supports Russia in Iraq against the Kurds and Americans, and because S400 and because little Hitler. Georgia supports Armenia because it's against Russia which is against Georgia, but supports Armenia. Likewise Ukraine, against Russia over Donbass and Crimea. Are we supporting Ukraine over Crimean war or over annexation, by the way?! And Cyprus supports at least one of the sides of the conflict this week, recently, against Turkey. But only the Greek part of Cyprus, of course, because Greece and Turkey are military allies, but don't like each other over the Ottoman empire, and a few other bits (Nicosia, anyone?). So, it's potently evident, that the usual suspects for the ddos is Israel, which supports Azerbaijan, at least as long as they keep ordering Israeli drones. Don't ask me, why Azerbaijan should buy Turkish drones and Israeli drones, rather than our drones and why should a Jewish state support a basically Islamic state. I guess Vatican secretly ships arms to Armenia, because holy war, etc. Popcorn please! :(
> a Turkish F-16 fighter jet reportedly shot down an elderly Armenian Su-25 Frogfoot ground attack aircraft. It may be elderly but this is one of the most armoured aircraft in existence. Is it that most of the armour is concentrated on the underside, or did the F16 have some exceptional weaponry?
Mind you, this site: https://theaviationgeekclub.com/armenian-su-25-attack-aircraft-was-most-probably-shot-down-by-an-azeri-mig-29-and-not-by-a-turkish-f-16/ says it was a Mig-29!
Being "one of the most armoured aircraft in existence" merely means it's mildly more sturdy than your local farmer's 30 year old Defender. That's not going to do much against a 20mm gatling gun, let alone when a heat seeking missile takes off the tail.
In support of your linked article Turkey have denied this action. However, given Turkey's history of lying about killing Armenians their denial has no credibility and if Armenia responds with military action against Turkey I will not want the UK to treat this as an attack on NATO.
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