Can the Indians counter it. They also have drones Pakistan needs to counter. Also Pakistan needs to a counter to this counter for its own drones. Especially the larger ones that are meant to fly over enemy air space or over the ocean like the Anka-S.
No, they can't counter much. We can jam the GPS signal. that's what the electronic warfare equipment is about. Pakistan air force has such systems. GPS jammer are easily available. They just would not use it against US.
Instead of jamming GPS, they could have gradually increased GPS signal in such way to emulate GPS (i.e. as if it was coming due to multi-path scattering say due to mountains). Then they could have increased its strength so that "false GPS" now look real satellite transmitted GPS while actual GPS looks like say an example its coming from something like multi-path scattering that is noise (Its relatively low in power compared to now the fake one). That would be hard to defend against as GPS signal strength varies widely depending on lot of factors. So we could feed false GPS.
When we feed a "false GPS" signal (replacing the real GPS), we use "small drift to gradually lead the enemy off course or make them land in our own country (like Iranians did). So US would look for drift by using say inertial (e.g.laser rate gyro) among other sensors to estimate vehicle state (i.e. position velocity) etc. Then use these state estimates to find out vehicle's position and then correlate them with GPS signal received. If the position estimates are close in range, then both GPS and state estimates closely agree and received GPS is probably true.
But these estimates are probabilistic rather then exact. Hence if we feed the position drift that is within small statistically range, within an hour or two we can literally high jack the vehicle if we also jam the ground or satellite command signals that are coming from UAV control center (i.e. from pilots). That can be done using specifically developed Jammers. They are more effective when are in several or 10's of kilometer's range unless jammer's output power is huge or signal waveform is so cleverly design based on observation of the command signal, that it can jam the command signal coming from uav control center really well (i.e. from pilots on the ground). This would require dedicated hardware.
This news is about jamming such "command signals being used to control the vehicle remotely". that is cutting the pilot off all together. Then vehicle will probably crash or may be it is programmed to land in such cases. Pakistan should NOT have much trouble using GPS to hijack UAVs. The point is it worth the effort to experiment the proper drift signal which ememy's current state-estimation methodology cannot detect or to collect enough GPS clutter data in a given region so as to match Fake GPS rise pattern (rise from, fake GPS being zero to more then the actual GPS) in such a way that eventually GPS detection system can be fooled into seeing fake as real and real as fake. Its all about trial and error and perfecting it. that actually requires not just observing GPS pattern in regions of interest but also Learning about enemy UAVs (e.g. guessing their signal estimation accuracy). So trial and error to find out about them and then using what has worked. That means a dedicated team, receivers of various kinds, tracking enemy drones and analyzing the command patterns, to make sure things will work in actual war.
Once again this news is about, just jam the whole thing (i.e. no command signal reaching the UAV noting GPS jamming is easier) and let the uav crash.No need to bother to make it land. In the absence of command signals UAVs are generally programmed to crash since other wise in principles they can then be fed fake emulated signals that one can generate, provided one had the time to observe the original command signals and resulting behavior of the aircraft for long enough duration (and using various inference approaches such as using machine learning algorithms). Overtime this can lead to cyber hacking of the aircraft. SO usually UAVs are programmed to crash if command signals do not reach them for a certain time period.
Note machine learning algorithms are widely used in Pakistan (i.e. by I.T. Start ups, game developers etc.) especially by our agencies including probably for analyzing data obtained from interception of the global communications.
yes Pakistan intercepts undersea submarine cables tapping into global communications much like NSA. ISI initially was caught trying to buy openly commercial hardware for undersea submarine taping instead of secretly buying but now they are smarter (google it). Now its all belongs to Pakistan, the sixth country on the planet to do, the other 5 do it under the leadership of US, i.e. US, UK, australia etc. and not alone. Pakistan does it alone. ISI is capable enough to do it alone.
