Cyber Vulnerabilities Found In Navy's Newest Warship

An anonymous reader writes with some potentially troubling news about some security issues with the Navy's newest class of coastal warships."A Navy team of computer hacking experts found some deficiencies when assigned to try to penetrate the network of the USS Freedom, the lead vessel in the $37 billion Littoral Combat Ship program, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The Freedom arrived in Singapore last week for an eight-month stay, which its builder, Lockheed Martin Corp., hopes will stimulate Asian demand for the fast, agile and stealthy ships. 'We do these types of inspections across the fleet to find individual vulnerabilities, as well as fleet-wide trends,' said the official."

Comments

Re:sitting afk for 8 months

[hairyfeet]

They are trying to sell it because it is a Vista sized bomb, its underpowered, undergunned, its a billion dollar piece of shit. Which shouldn't be surprising as the only thing our military industrial complex has been able to do since the 90s is pad the expense account but there ya go, yet another billion dollar boondoggle that won't do what we need and is good for nothing more than target practice.

SITTING DUCK

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

The software and network vulnerability issues are the least of the problems for this Water Turkey.

The LCS is not expected to be survivable in a hostile combat environment
From the Congressional Research Service: "The LCS is not expected to be survivable in a hostile combat environment as evidenced by the limited shock hardened design and results of full scale testing of representative hull structures completed in December 2006."

"So, we have a warship design that is not expected to fight and survive in the very environment in which it was produced to do so. Poorly-armed, poorly-protected, with an over-abundance of speed that will eat through a fuel supply in half a day."

This New $350 Million Combat Ship Has Nearly Two Equipment Failures For Every Million Bucks

"The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) researches Pentagon weapons procurement and has published its April 23 letter to members of the House Armed Services Committee, who have themselves 'repeatedly questioned the utility and effectiveness of the Littoral Combat Ship program' in the past.... From the time the Navy accepted LCS-1 from Lockheed Martin on September 18, 2008, until the ship went into dry dock in the summer of 2011 - not even 1,000 days later - there were 640 chargeable equipment failures on the ship. On average then, something on the ship failed on two out of every three days."

Hello US Navy! Thanks for accelerating climate-change, while subverting your mission and betraying the tax payer. I guess your next job, at Lockheed or General Dynamics will be worth all the criminal fraud and needless deaths.

Re:SITTING DUCK

[teslabox]

Hello US Navy! Thanks for accelerating climate-change, while subverting your mission and betraying the tax payer. I guess your next job, at Lockheed or General Dynamics will be worth all the criminal fraud and needless deaths.

It seems to me that the U.S. military is 30% vocational-training program for people who are failed by k-12 education, 30% make-work (manning missile silos in Montana and maintaining the nuclear arsenal, for example) to sop up human capital that was freed up by the industrialization of agriculture, and 30% wealth-transfer program. I'll give "defense" 10%.

Realignment of the U.S. military's budget should consider what's important (vocational training, tech R&D), and what's not.

Re:SITTING DUCK

[ColdWetDog]

While the articles are pretty inflammatory and don't really have any details (including the issue with cracks - that's not unexpected in prototypes of high performance watercraft, they can usually be fixed), the core issue is this:

This harsh analysis comes just days after the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report concluding the Defense Department has a problem with committing to expensive new weapons systems before development is complete.

This makes no sense whatsoever except as a lucrative cash cow (even a spherical one) for the contractors.

If you want cutting edge, create a skunk works (maybe the marine equivalent would be slime eel works?). Let them work out the bugs. Your PRODUCTION ships are well defined technology, as kept as simple as possible. Designed for real mission work - not fantasy battles with aliens. Less sizzle, more steak.

Re:SITTING DUCK

[Anonymous Coward]

There are actually two LCS classes in service: the Independence class and the Freedom class. The non-survivable LCS is the Freedom class, which is overweight, under-prepared to withstand hostile fire without external buoyancy aids, sucks at shooting anything due to poor weaps design, and its helicopter can't do minesweeping because it's too weak. The Independence class has some corrosion problems, but seems to be a better and more stable design overall.

They've both had serious operational problems; USS Coronado (LCS4, Independence Class) just made the news with a very minor fire breaking out on board due to some insulation burning, while USS Freedom (LCS1) has had flooding in 2012 and lost its engines in 2013, leaving it adrift at sea.

Neither LCS is the kind of ship you expect from the world's naval superpower, even as a workhorse non-combat ship. It's a bastard offspring of the Zumwalt class destroyer, which is retooling of the failed DDG1000. All over cost projections, all underwhelming. Too many people trying to get one ship (in each case) to do too many things at the bleeding edge, while we keep WW2-era battleships in museums in good condition with an eye to calling them back into service when we need naval firepower. It's quite a disappointment that the world's naval superpower has such Little Crappy Ships under development, when the Dutch can field the Holland class and other nations are developing small, fast, useful ships.

Re:Some Things Never Change

[maxwell demon]

USS Yorktown circa 1997

Interesting quote from there:

“Because of politics, some things are being forced on us that without political pressure we might not do, like Windows NT. If it were up to me I probably would not have used Windows NT in this particular application ... Refining that is an ongoing process ... Unix is a better system for control of equipment and machinery, whereas NT is a better system for the transfer of information and data. NT has never been fully refined and there are times when we have had shutdowns that resulted from NT.”

—Ron Redman

Re:Some Things Never Change

[PPH]

Client software shouldn't be able to bring down an O/S. Never mind an entire network.