Astronomers discover pair of record-setting supermassive black holes (Yahoo! News)

RQ-170 (File Photo, via Aviation Weekly)

A day after the Pentagon acknowledged that an unmanned American reconnaissance drone went missing while on an operation in western Afghanistan late last week, Defense officials still smarting from the incident have come forward to dismiss Iranian claims that the drone was brought down by hostile activity. And American cyber experts similarly expressed skepticism over Iranian contentions that hackers based in Iran brought down the drone by penetrating its software or jamming its signals.

"The one thing I can tell you is we don't have any indications that the UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle], that we know we no longer have, was brought down by hostile activity of any kind," Pentagon spokesman Capt. John Kirby told reporters at a Pentagon press briefing Monday otherwise short of many further details on the embarrassing incident, ABC News's Luis Martinez reported. "As it says in the statement, the controllers lost control and, without getting into specific details, I think we're comfortable stating that there's no indication of hostile activity."

Likewise, the reported contention made by some Iranian military officials that an Iranian cyber-warfare unit commandeered the drone strains credulity, cyber-security expert James Lewis said.

"Iran hacking into the drone is as likely as an Ayatollah standing on a mountain-top and using thought waves to bring it down," Lewis, a former Reagan administration official now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Yahoo News by email Monday. "The most likely explanation is that it crashed on its own."

"If you could hack into a drone, you wouldn't use it for some spontaneous fun, you'd save it for a rainy day," Lewis continued. "You'd need to be able to hack either the control network in the U.S. or a satellite.? Neither is easy, and both are probably not something the Iranians can do."Read More ?

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/techblog/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_technews/20111205/tc_yblog_technews/astronomers-discover-pair-of-record-setting-supermassive-black-holes

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