Re: heard in passing
It's entirely possible that this story can be taken at face value. We screw up as much as anybody else, I suppose.
But when I hear things like this, one of my first thoughts is that it might indicate an attempt at misdirection. If we know that the enemy is hacking drone signals (and as ER points out, we've apparently known for some time), that gives us an avenue to feed them the (mis)information we want them to have--or at the very least, to give them the impression they have an advantage that they do not.