US Navy Hacked

[Delancey]

On one of the destroyer collision threads a while back I suggested hacking and was scoffed at. Remember the US Navy reinstituted a celestial navigation requirement for officers not too long ago? People also scoffed at the notion.

Turns out along the way some smart guy put malware on USB drives sold near military bases for some dummy to plug into the non-internet connected military network. Guess what happened? Made some people nervous.

Now this - "If hackers breached the McCain’s digital defenses, it would represent a startling development in naval warfare. American intelligence officials have theorized that hackers working on behalf of an enemy state could conceivably hack into a ship’s computer systems and blind its commander by, for example, displaying an inaccurate location of the ship on its charts."

U.S. Navy Investigating If Destroyer Crash Was Caused by Cyberattack | Foreign Policy

[Suijin]

Well this is interesting. If they are investigating if the collision was caused by a cyber attack, that indicates that there was not some other more obvious and easily ascertained reason.

Relatedly, it has always been curious that these two most recent incidents happened in the same small corner of the world, relatively speaking.

[Wotname]

Also from the same article - While the idea of a cyberattack causing a collision remain purely speculative,.

It the two recent events, a simple set of functional eyeballs and the ability to speak (and think) was all that was needed to avoid a collision. Mariners do this thousands of times a day all around the world.

I do accept that a hacked electronic system could severely affect a naval vessel's ability to conduct offensive / defensive operations. However this wasn't the case in the recent collisions.

[willpower1]

The Navy has a very rugged and thorough IA plan. I find it very hard to believe that someone using a thumb drive especially a thumb drive corrupted the net work and caused a ship to crash. Not to mention many of the ships use COTS equipment in some form or fashion as an alternate to all the secret squirrel stuff that would not be connected to any network and would be stand alone.

[newhaul]

All the back and forth aside
The fact is they are actually investigating the possibility of a potential cyber attack

[Delancey]

Originally Posted by newhaul

All the back and forth aside
The fact is they are actually investigating the possibility of a potential cyber attack

Exactly. They ARE investigating it. GPS spoofing is not new. The return to celestial navigation is in part due the potential for it. GPS spoofing doesn't explain a lack of situational awareness that resulted in a crash but a hack that crippled radar systems would, especially for a video game navigator not keeping eyes on the horizon.

Don't forget about the RQ-170 Drone hack, which sounds like it was more than just a GPS spoof and may have involved a hack of the inertial guidance system along with signals jamming.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran...Q-170_incident

As far as the thumb drive incident, which I just gave as an example, it was earlier than I thought, all the way back in 2008

"At the time, a person needing to buy a thumb drive in Kabul, Afghanistan could find inexpensive ones at retail kiosks throughout the city. Russian intelligence agents noticed that US service members tended to buy computer supplies at kiosks near NATO’s Kabul headquarters. So, they pre-programmed a number of thumb drives with malware and then supplied them to the shops. Eventually, a US service member bought one and inserted it into a secure computer—just as the hackers hoped they would."

[CatNewBee]

Wasn't this the way the US / Israel hacked the Iran nuclear centrifuges system with the Stuxnet stuff?

[double u]

...maybe they hacked into the watchkeepers brains...(with C2H5OH??)