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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??
Have the considered it's not a state actor but a rich media mogul who's causing the accidents to extend his media empire? If only there were dashing British secret agent to stop this dastardly villain's evil plans.
Any military power using anything from Microsoft.
#DeleteFacebook
On a big ship no one is relying on GPS alone.
Every ship has a magnetic compass.
A helmsman should realize if the compass heading ans speed versus the GPS position makes any sense.
Then again: during daytime a big civilian (freight!) vessel is like a mountain. It is extremely hard to overlook it.
During night time, the whole deck of big ocean going vessles is illuminated by flood lights.
Unless in fog, IT IS COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSEE IT
And then we have radar .... so if the ship got "hacked" the only option are hacked bandanas on the eyes of the watch and a hacked radar system.
The latter would be a story, though.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
does anyone else remember the "flagship US airforce carrier" that, back in the mid 1990s, had to be TOWED into harbour... because it was running Window NT 4.0 systems... which had just crashed across the *entire* ship? and does anyone else remember soldiers running Sony BMG Root-kitted CDs which then illegally sent out a listing of CLASSIFIED FILENAMES OFF TO SONY'S SERVERS?? do we not remember these things??
there is a *really good reason* why the NSA refuses to permit windows systems on its premises. why cannot the U.S. Military get it through its thick fucking head that running an OS that's been cost-shaved by a company that REFUSES TO LET ITS SECURITY TEAM MAKE CRITICAL CHANGES because the Security Director is told, every single fucking time "your proposed security improvement will cost us money. get lost and come back when you have a quotes security quotes fix that actually makes us some money".
we KNOW it's insecure. we KNOW it can be root-kitted (thank you NSA). we KNOW that there is ransomware and christ knows what else. so i don't understand why people do not understand that to run the Windows Operating System is tantamount to self-harm, and any Military that runs the Windows OS is basically, sad to say it, ASKING - no is DESPERATE - to be screwed over by anyone and everyone.
This sounds like the basic plot from a half-dozen or so of the James Bond movies.
#DeleteChrome
The tanker ran into the warship. Coming into port the water can get crowded, with two-way, large-ship traffic. The warship was hit on the port side, which is a strong indication it had the right of way.
If any vehicle was hacked here, it was the tanker. While GPS jamming/spoofing is possible, getting it to reroute into a specific other ship is not an easy hack.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
They may have been stuck in a forced upgrade to Windows 10, and were in the process of rebooting when the collisions occurred. Could Microsoft have ignored the Navy's desires not to upgrade to Windows 10, i.e., taken the Navy's dismissal as an OK to do so?
Except that the merchant ships were in a TSS, and the destroyer apparently tried to cross behind one cargo ship, ahead of another, and got hit by the third, that had been obstructed by the first cargo ship.
The Fitzgerald also ran across a TSS
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.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
tesla autopilot is to blame
google map update caused the issue
Trump whined to Putin after McCain blocked the health bill
China warns US of what will happen if they don't get more islands/territory
India/Micorosoft windows 10 update/virus mishap
North Korea... err ummm they did something that caused something because they are highly capable
well its a start.
Should four collisions in the same geographical area be chalked up to coincidence? Could a military vessel be hacked?
Coincidence? No.
Could the boats have been hacked? yes - but it's incredibly unlikely.
What other possibilities are there? The 99% reason is stupidity. Either some idiot doesn't know how to drive a boat ( x4) or the standard naval tactics to "dominate" any given situation have been taken to extremes - beyond the capabilities of the people and equipment in use.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Here's a reference video of the AIS tracks for the cargo vessels, collision handles shortly after the 50s mark.
.
https://youtu.be/vlrA36GzHNs
Alnic MC is in a cluster of ships together with Team Oslo, Guang Zhou, Hyundai Global and a bit behind them was the Long Hu San
Observe the evasive maneuver that first the Guang Zhou undertakes, and then the sharp turn to port the Alnic MC tries to perform, to avoid the collision.
It's a shame that you only remember the rumors and myths instead of finding out the facts. The aircraft carrier you're referring to is the USS Yorktown, which did suffer computer-related problems around 1997. But if the problem was just that the OS crashed, they could have just rebooted the damn thing!
The actual problem was a crew member entered a 0 into a field in a network database, causing all of the software using the database to fail after attempting to divide by 0. The ship was dead in the water for under three hours and returned to port under its own power.
In other words, this was a problem with the software running the ship, not the OS! Considering that most bugs are in the software running on the OS and not the OS itself, this should not be a surprise.
dom
There is a culture of overwork that results in severe sleep deprivation in the US Navy, and many people standing watch are impaired at an equivalent level to beign legally drunk. It's been the confirmed cause of other incidents before, and it seems a far more likely explanation than cyber attacks. Unfortunately, the Navy does not appear to be doing much to solve the problem.
The buck stops at one of the 16 White House staff members who have been fired. But it definitely doesn't stop at the top. Trump's Navy has the most spectacular crashes. Big, beautiful crashes that we can all be proud of.
If you can't stand the heat, stay off the golf course.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Sort of.
Navy funds have generally been more available for new ship construction with training and operations spending coming under financial stress in recent years. This makes administrations look good, and politicians of all stripes love the shipbuilding financial spending that flows into a great many districts. Yet it can leave operational readiness stretched.
Add the gender integration of the service. For whatever reason (likely a high operational tempo and longer deployments by the USN compared to some navies) a significant number of deployed female naval personnel are becoming pregnant; in 2016, 16/100 female sailors deployed had to be transferred back to shore. No one wants to talk about this, understandably so, as there are no easy answers.
There is no additional funding for this; it cost the Navy $110m last year, and places huge stresses on those remaining -- both male and female -- who often have to step in without adequate backup and training. Even simply providing additional funding won't magically solve the problem, as a loss rate of 16/100 is quite high, and it can occur somewhat unpredictably, hitting certain commands harder.
It's speculation but I'd guess that many collisions are down to watchkeeping errors and/or one or more people falling asleep on watch. Terrible, but possibly comprehensible given the stresses many crews are under.
They may have been stuck in a forced upgrade to Windows 10, and were in the process of rebooting when the collisions occurred. Could Microsoft have ignored the Navy's desires not to upgrade to Windows 10, i.e., taken the Navy's dismissal as an OK to do so?
"Ready fire control! Bogies off the port bow!"
"I can't, sir. All the screens say 'Hi. We're setting things up for you'".
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
Remember the US carrier fleet commander who got into an argument about who should change course with a lighthouse?
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.
Modern cargo ships can do fairly sharp emergency turns, but it was also helped by the destroyer. Fortunately for the McCain, the cargo ship was ballasted, so not running full cargo, and it was going fairly slowly(around 9-10kts only, IIRC).
Trump whined to Putin after McCain blocked the health bill
"You saw what happened to that ship named 'McCain'? Be a shame if the same thing happened to you..."
... running an OS that's been cost-shaved by a company that REFUSES TO LET ITS SECURITY TEAM MAKE CRITICAL CHANGES because the Security Director is told, every single fucking time "your proposed security improvement will cost us money. get lost and come back when you have a quotes security quotes fix that actually makes us some money".
...
Not off-topic here...
That is what I think of every time I boot into Windows 8.1, which insists on telling me that I am exposing myself to danger (my fault) if I turn off the Microsoft-written and integrated "Windows Virus Defender" (or whatever it's called) from scanning and updating whenever it feels like doing so.
I mean, really... Come on... The "antivirus protection" comes WITH the OS that I installed, and was written by the same company! It's basically a tacit admission that "we write bug-riddled code, which must be monitored, so included in the OS itself is a 'threat-monitor'."
Who the fuck made the decision to make that argument to the purchaser, and who the fuck wrote that system dialog? It defies all logic.
"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?
There is no "right-of-way" on the water.
Are we nitpicking again?
What is the difference between "right of way" and "stand-on vessel"?
For a layman there is none ... and actually as I have a diploma in nautics, I really wonder at what you are aiming, because for me there is none, too.
Anyhow, if the warship in question was crossing a charted traffic scheme, it is by definition at fault. .... it is an american war ship ... cough, cough.
Correct. But on the other hand
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
They have that covered in spades.
Maybe the biggest threat to the US is... The US.
Requiem for the American Dream
There is no single hack that should work to cause an accident like this. It doesn't matter if GPS is hacked or even off. It doesn't matter if your navigation system is faulty or given the wrong information. It doesn't matter if your radars are down. The fact of the matter is, ships have been navigating in congested waters at night for hundreds of years and there is no hack that should serve to cause a collision.
Bridge watchkeepers are supposed to be trained in heads up visual navigation. GPS, ECPINS, AIS, navigation radars - they are all useful tools, but a watchkeeper is supposed to be trained to know when those tools are lying to to them. Because it really isn't a matter of if, but when something will happen to cause one or more of those tools to lie to you. This is especially true of warship watchkeepers who are supposed to be trained to operate in places where there may be denial of service for GPS or where AIS is being spoofed.
I wrote about something like this before - almost two years ago. 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.
This isn't a cyber attack. There is no attack on anything on the American ship that should have defeated the watchkeeper's mark 1 eyeball, and hacking a container ship to hit a warship with is like hacking a semi truck and thinking you are going to use it to ram a dirt bike on an open field. It's simply not possible to hit a warship with a container vessel if the warship has a watchkeeper that is awake.
A good conspiracy theorist would not squander his credibilty by getting basic facts wrong, like saying a collision occurred in the "Pacific southeast" when it actually occurred north of the equator in the Western Pacific. The Southeastern Pacific is off the coast of Chile, about 16,000 km away, or roughly halfway around the world.
a crew member entered a 0 into a field in a network database
The first time the Navy has had a ship disabled by a zero since WWII.
Have gnu, will travel.
Well, we know it has to be an American conspiracy if the geography is so blatantly wrong.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The problem with INTEGRITY is that there's almost no one left who still knows how to work with it. It's only used in the military anyway, and even there it's been dying out. You can't use people skilled in Linux to work with it, because companies only want to hire people who already are experts at something, so the talent pool is now nearly elderly and retiring. All the young engineers are familiar with Linux so that's what ends up getting used even if it isn't the greatest choice.
"The accuracy of the GPS signal is identical for both the civilian GPS service (SPS) and the military GPS service (PPS). Civilian SPS broadcasts on only one frequency 1575.42 MHz, while military PPS uses two 1575.42 MHz and 1227.60 MHz."
"Once upon a time, the unencrypted signal included a random error factor that would make the civilian GPS randomly wrong in a different direction each day. I believe it started with errors up to 400 meters, which was still plenty accurate for general ocean navigation. The policy / feature was called “Selective Availability” and was killed in 2000."
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-difference-between-military-GPS-data-and-civilians-in-terms-of-accuracy
Well, yes, and no.. The higher chipping frequency of the P(Y) code (the military signal) makes it more resistant to jamming. Also, being able to decode both signals allows the receiver to calculate the density of the ionosphere, and thus be far more accurate. The biggest source of error is signal delay induced by the (variable) ionosphere. This delay is partially dependent on frequency, so by measuring the delta between the civilian and military signals, you can thus factor the ionosphere out. It's a really cute trick.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
You're thinking of a different incident.
It was a battleship, not a carrier.
No, the USS Yorktown, CG-48, is a Ticonderoga-class cruiser. The US doesn't have any battleships in service, and didn't in 1997 when the incident occurred. The previous USS Yorktown, CV-10, was an Essex-class carrier, which is probably the source of the confusion about CV-48's ship type.
And yes, it did indeed require towage back to port.
So claims Government Computer News. According to Atlantic Fleet, the captain and the contractor who was the source of the GCN story, it did not. The contractor said the reporter altered his statements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CG-48)#Smart_ship_testbed
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