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

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.

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