The post goes on to warn online jihadists “to not enter any of the links that concern these websites, and not even to surf [the content] until you receive the confirmed news by your brothers, Allah-willing.”

Outages of jihadist websites are relatively common, though this may be the first example on a website being hacked, Evan Kohlmann of Flashpoint Partners told Wired.

“The official Afghan Taliban website has, of course, routinely been knocked offline and disabled by cyber vigilantes and other culprits, but this would be the first instance that I’m aware of it being actually ‘infiltrated,’” he said. “It’s an unsettling prospect for security-minded online jihadists, because such sites can be manipulated by a variety of hostile parties in order to harvest a breathtaking amount of personal data on regular visitors.”

While no one has claimed credit for the hack, the Department of Defense has previously announced its intentions to take-down terrorist affiliated websites.

SkyGrabber allows users to intercept and download movie downloads, text messages and images and saves the data to the users hard drive. It allows the user to circumvent ‘pay-to-play’ websites commonly used in the pornography industry. The software does not require a user to have an Internet connection, instead utilizing satellite technology.

According to the SkyGrabber website, “SkyGrabber is offline satellite internet downloader. It accepts free to air (FTA) satellite data (movie, music, pictures) by digital satellite TV tuner card (DVB-S/DVB-S2) and saves information onto a hard disk. So, you’ll get new movie, best music and funny pictures for free.” The technology is quite cheap, costing around $25-$30.

The vulnerability in the UAV feeds is a problem of encryption. Presently, the video feeds from the drone are not encrypted during transmission, allowing anyone with the SkyGrabber technology to intercept and view the video feeds. The US has known about the vulnerability since the peacekeeping mission to Bosnia in the 1990s. However, the military believed that our adversaries would not be capable of exploiting it.

Nevertheless, the military is now moving quickly to rectify the problem. Some experts have pointed to the benefits of this vulnerability being highlighted now. In a recent interview, Jim Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said “The good news is that we learned our lesson now and not against a more sophisticated opponent. You can assume that if the insurgents were listening in off their laptops, other people were listening in as well.”