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Fourth US Navy Collision This Year Raises Suspicion of Cyber-Attacks (thenextweb.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Next Web: Early Monday morning a U.S. Navy Destroyer collided with a merchant vessel off the coast of Singapore. The U.S. Navy initially reported that 10 sailors were missing, and today found "some of the remains" in flooded compartments. While Americans mourn the loss of our brave warriors, top brass is looking for answers. Monday's crash involving the USS John McCain is the fourth in the area, and possibly the most difficult to understand. So far this year 17 U.S. sailors have died in the Pacific southeast due to seemingly accidental collisions with civilian vessels.
Should four collisions in the same geographical area be chalked up to coincidence? Could a military vessel be hacked? In essence, what if GPS spoofing or administrative lockout caused personnel to be unaware of any imminent danger or unable to respond? The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) says there's no reason to think it was a cyber-attack, but they're looking into it: "2 clarify Re: possibility of cyber intrusion or sabotage, no indications right now...but review will consider all possibilities," tweeted Adm. John Richardson. The obvious suspects -- if a sovereign nation is behind any alleged attacks -- would be Russia, China, and North Korea, all of whom have reasonable access to the location of all four incidents. It may be chilling to imagine such a bold risk, but it's not outlandish to think a government might be testing cyber-attack capabilities in the field.
Should four collisions in the same geographical area be chalked up to coincidence? Could a military vessel be hacked? In essence, what if GPS spoofing or administrative lockout caused personnel to be unaware of any imminent danger or unable to respond? The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) says there's no reason to think it was a cyber-attack, but they're looking into it: "2 clarify Re: possibility of cyber intrusion or sabotage, no indications right now...but review will consider all possibilities," tweeted Adm. John Richardson. The obvious suspects -- if a sovereign nation is behind any alleged attacks -- would be Russia, China, and North Korea, all of whom have reasonable access to the location of all four incidents. It may be chilling to imagine such a bold risk, but it's not outlandish to think a government might be testing cyber-attack capabilities in the field.
Isn't there someone on the deck looking for other ships in the vicinity?
Just saying??
Any military power using anything from Microsoft.
#DeleteFacebook
Any nation-state with the ability to hack software that would influence the most powerful warships in the world would not be doing so for farts and giggles over the course of months to cause a few (in the scheme of things) relatively minor collisions during peace time. They would reserve this cyber weapon for use when it really counted. If this was the result of a lone wolf hacker they would have sold this weapon for a huge amount of money to any of the countries that would want them to use against the US when needed, not risking its discovery messing around with it just for fun.
Better known as 318230.
A foreign state actor hacked into a US Naval Destroyer and with precision knocked out the steering to the ship at a critical moment where by it couldn't maneuver and was rammed by merchant vessel. And then moments later restored the steering to a working condition. Is that it? Do I have it right?
As opposed to some mechanical/electrical malfunction happening at a critical moment causing said accident and the systems being manually reset after the fact.
Yeah, right. Anyone who has ever worked with complex mechanical/electrical equipment knows that shit happens and that you don't need external actors to screw things up for you. And that goes without saying that the tropics are not an area that is conducive to nice, neat operations of equipment (consider the British destroyers that can't operate in the warm waters of the Middle East)
So may I present exhibit "A". It's this sharp piece of metal in the form of a razor. Once owned by a chap named Occam.
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Ding! Ding! Ding!
We have a winner. I don't give a damn about any stupid GPS spoofing, you don't run ships into each other unless the crew is so absurdly tired that they're literally sleeping on watch.
This is well known, and a cultural issue through all the services, especially more recently. It has nothing to do with funding or politics or any other bullshit.
That's a really sharp left turn at 0:55. ;-)
Can a tanker do that, or is this a clue the AIS might have been on something smaller?
( Which would indicate a deliberate attack. )
Or more likely, the navy 'helped' the ship with the turn
The navy really should publish a video with their track along with these.
For unfortunately, all these collisions.
It's hard to understand how the navy's lookouts for visual, ais, and radar could have not seen this.
This should not be a human fatigue issue.
If they were crossing the shipping lane, then they should have been especially alert.
The plan of not publishing naval ship location data with ais to make the fleet safer doesn't seem to be working.
(It may be costing more ships than it is saving.)
It wouldn't cost much opsec if the navy were to start turning on their ais when they are this close to the shipping lane.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
These are warships, supposedly capable of detecting supersonic enemy planes on attack vectors as well as missiles, hundred of miles away and they are unable to detect a fucking container-ship as big as a skyscraper 50 yards away?
That was a joke, reworded many times and debunked even more times.
Even a joke carries a kernel of truth. And the truth is american exceptionalism doesn't play well with others. So of course we're going to get these kinds of incidents. You have to change the american psyche and that my slashdotter friends is mission impossible.
Remember the US carrier fleet commander who got into an argument about who should change course with a lighthouse?
That was a joke which never actually took place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... & http://www.navy.mil/navydata/q...
I figure it's much more likely that the captain demanded the traffic (driven by or for nignogs, clearly, it's the middle east) change course and played chicken with a tanker that has no chance of complying due to their massive size.
The accident took place in the straits of Malacca which is hardly the middle east. If the Captain was so arrogant as to play chicken he could've just sunk the merchant ship when it got to close.
It'd take an awfully crazy Navy captain to sink a foreign flagged ship in a public shipping channel.
Most likely cause was probably weather reducing visibility (heavy fog/mist is quite common in that area) so they didn't see the ship until it was to late.
That might be a valid excuse if either vessel was a 20 ft sailboat, but a 2 billion dollar Arleigh Class destroyer has 6MW worth of radar. Even my friend's 30 foot boat has a 4KW radar system than can see ships miles away through heavy fog and rain.
If it can't see a 500 ft tanker approaching, what chance does it have in wartime?
American warships have a reputation in NATO as being driven by amateurs. During fleet manoeuvers, the rest of us actively plot wider safety bubbles around American ships because they are erratic and have a tendency to simply go the wrong direction and just not care.
That's because the *are* piloted by amateurs (relatively speaking).
A merchant marine captain will spend his entire life in the same career track, building on and enhancing his skills. A Navy captain will have gone through extensive training in school, then work his way through various specialties (engineering, communications, weapons, etc) before he finally gets his command, so he's got much less experience as a merchant marine captain. And even when in command, he's responsible for hundreds of sailors instead of the dozen or two that a merchant vessel would have.