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Title: Ukraine's Massive Drone Attack Was Powered by Open Source Software

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/03/1518...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Open source software used by hobbyist
drones powered an attack that wiped out a third of Russia's strategic long
range bombers on Sunday afternoon, in one of the most daring and technically
coordinated attacks in the war. In broad daylight on Sunday, explosions
rocked air bases in Belaya, Olenya, and Ivanovo in Russia, which are hundreds
of miles from Ukraine. The Security Services of Ukraine's (SBU) Operation
Spider Web was a coordinated assault on Russian targets it claimed was more
than a year in the making, which was carried out using a nearly 20-year-old
piece of open source drone autopilot software called ArduPilot. ArduPilot's
original creators were in awe of the attack. "That's ArduPilot, launched from
my basement 18 years ago. Crazy," Chris Anderson said in a comment on
LinkedIn below footage of the attack. On X, he tagged his the co-creators
Jordi Munoz and Jason Short in a post about the attack. "Not in a million
years would I have predicted this outcome. I just wanted to make flying
robots," Short said in a reply to Anderson. "Ardupilot powered drones just
took out half the Russian strategic bomber fleet." ArduPilot is an open
source software system that takes its name from the Arduino hardware systems
it was originally designed to work with. It began in 2007 when Anderson
launched the website DIYdrones.com and cobbled together a UAV autopilot
system out of a Lego Mindstorms set.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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