‘Wanted to make flying robots’: How Ukraine used 20-year-old open source code to take down Russian bombers

In one of the most daring and technically complex attacks of the Russia-Ukraine war, Ukraine’s Security Services (SBU) deployed a fleet of small drones using open source software to devastate Russia’s long-range bomber fleet.

The operation, dubbed Spider Web, was reportedly over a year in the making — and was executed in broad daylight, with precision strikes on air bases in Belaya, Olenya, and Ivanovo, hundreds of miles inside Russian territory.

At the heart of this unprecedented strike was ArduPilot — a 20-year-old piece of open source autopilot software originally built by drone hobbyists for peaceful, educational, and recreational use. It was never intended to be a weapon of war, but it has now etched its place in military history.

ArduPilot’s story began in 2007, when Chris Anderson – then editor-in-chief of WIRED magazine – started the website DIYdrones.com and pieced together a functioning UAV autopilot system using Lego Mindstorms. The platform became a community hub for tech-savvy hobbyists and drone enthusiasts. In 2009, Anderson partnered with Jordi Munoz, a fellow drone enthusiast who had just won an autonomous vehicle competition, to launch 3DR, a consumer drone company that also birthed the first functional versions of ArduPilot.

His collaborator, Jason Short, was equally stunned. “Not in a million years would I have predicted this outcome. I just wanted to make flying robots,” he wrote on X, tagging Anderson and Munoz. “ArduPilot-powered drones just took out half the Russian strategic bomber fleet.”