US Navy collisions stoke cyber threat concerns

Even if they were spoofed, every Navy ship has many people on watch at one time and radar is more than enough to compensate. A more reasonable explanation is exhausted crew and human error.

Unfortunately I see &#x27;complete incompetence&#x27; as the only rational explanation. This is just the latest in a string of naval disasters this year which are not just confounding and bizarre rank amateur displays, but have resulted in loss of life.<p>At this point, the American people deserve nothing less than an extraordinary response and complete accountability throughout the ranks. When destroyers are getting rammed by <i>cargo ships</i>, and guided missile cruisers are colliding with fishing bots, and running aground, we have a systemic problem with training, discipline, or protocol, likely all three.<p>You simply cannot blame broken GPS on getting your destroyer rammed by a 20,000 ton cargo ship. Our enlisted deserve better, and Admirals should be getting shit-canned for this.

This is purely uninformed speculation. Radar and eyeballs are sufficient to prevent these types of incidents.<p>Sleep deprivation has continued to be pointed to as a major issue on ships, and yet from the CNO down, this has been ignored and nothing done: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usni.org&#x2F;magazines&#x2F;proceedings&#x2F;2017-07&#x2F;let-our-sailors-sleep" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usni.org&#x2F;magazines&#x2F;proceedings&#x2F;2017-07&#x2F;let-our-s...</a>

He&#x27;s just making that stuff up.<p>The US Navy has released surprisingly little info on the Fitzgerald collision. The new &quot;report&quot; is all about damage control after the collision, not the events leading up to it.

I am actually more concerned about the 10 missing sailors, not just concerns for their lives, but I am really concerned how they went missing after the collision? The ship&#x27;s damage is not very bad. I can understand they could have fallen into water, but this doesn&#x27;t make a lot of sense. If they were facing the impact, they would have run away. If they were in other three directions, then I am surprised that ten sailors got thrown off the deck, and none of them could get back on the water surface. This raises my concern for the ship&#x27;s rails.<p>--EDIT--<p>I believe this incident occurred early in the morning around 5:24 a.m and I don&#x27;t think it was in total darkness. Also, what about the transport ship? Shouldn&#x27;t they also have the ability to detect (and also human for lookup) since this is one of the busiest lane?

If it is indeed GPS spoofing it must be happening to commercial vessels right? Doesn&#x27;t the US military use a different, more accurate&#x2F;secure version of GPS? It seems more likely the less secure AIS protocol is somehow being manipulated.

&quot;Cyber&quot; seems to have taken on the role formerly filled by angry divine beings: If something happens and we don&#x27;t know what it is or why it happened, we used to think someone angered a god or an ancestor. Now, it&#x27;s cyber.<p>Don&#x27;t forget that several wars have started based on misattributed events. In just the U.S.: The Maine and the Spanish-American War, the Gulf of Tonkin and the Vietnam War, Iraq&#x27;s WMD program and al-Qaeda alliance and the Iraq War ...<p>And attribution is especially difficult in attacks on computer systems. An enterprising, well-resourced actor could provoke war between enemies or division between allies with a well-crafted attack.

I am not a naval person by any stretch, but I thought the protocol on <i>any</i> large ship (military or civilian) was to have at least one, if not two people on watch at all times?<p>I would assume a navy ship would have multiple people with eyes &#x27;outside the boat&#x27; especially in a busy shipping (and piracy ridden) lane such as the Malacca Straits?

Does anyone have a technical explanation of how gps spoofing works?

&gt; The U.S. military uses encrypted signals for geolocation of vessels, rather than commercial GPS.<p>It seems like a massive oversight to keep encrypted GPS signals for use exclusively for US military. As mentioned in another comment, the collision could have been caused by spoofing the commercial ships GPS rather than a cyber attack on the Navy vessel.<p>The ability to selectively enable GPS in a region for only US military (as mentioned, once again, in another comment) doesn&#x27;t even seem like that big of a strategic advantage - surely a sophisticated enemy wouldn&#x27;t rely on GPS, would they?<p>Any strategic advantage doesn&#x27;t really seem worth the potentially massive damage that could be caused by a large scale spoofing of GPS signals.

Regardless of any GPS spoofing that could be present, it&#x27;d be awfully hard to hide the radar return from a large tanker&#x2F;cargo ship.

A much better explanation for that is that the guys there are being overworked and exhausted. Navy resources are overstretched as there is lack of destroyers due to many years of interruption in DDG construction. Navy has at least 12 destroyers less than it would have if not the catastrophe of Zumwalt class construction.

&quot;#USSJohnSMcCain suffered steering loss approaching Strait of Malacca, unclear why crew couldn&#x27;t utilize back-up -Navy official&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jimsciutto&#x2F;status&#x2F;899793613126864897" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jimsciutto&#x2F;status&#x2F;899793613126864897</a>

I imagine one could make a modern device that tracks position by watching the sky. I wonder how well could that work in bad weather. Is there any light spectrum of the stars that passes through a serious storm? Humans may be incapable of seeing it but how about advanced telescope&#x2F;camera?

The U.S. government&#x27;s budget sequester has forced the military to greatly reduce training and therefore readiness. The Air Force attributed recent fighter plane accidents to a lack of training. I wonder if these accidents are related.

The crew uses cellphones (browsing Singapore Tinder is a really good way to kill time while not falling asleep during the watch at 4am - makes for a peculiar case of &quot;texting while driving&quot; though). Coming from the providers in the region, with many directly or indirectly owned&#x2F;invested&#x2F;hacked by China, the phones are already hacked, and they provide a pretty good attack vector on any wireless ship system and after that on any other that it is connected too. Though my bet here is on pretty obvious Chinese spoofing of the destroyers&#x27; GPS - it being supposedly military grade makes it the last thing to be looked at.

This article is just idle speculation with some of the vague &#x27;Russia is behind it&#x27; rhetoric we&#x27;ve been seeing over the past few years.<p>Even if someone had developed the capability to spoof military grade GPS why would they use it on a random ship for no reason? That would accomplish nothing while tipping off the military that someone had cracked GPS.<p>Even if this is a GPS problem at all it is more likely to be a bug in the implementation than a targeted attack.<p>By Occam&#x27;s Razor this is likely just a plain old human error and not some sophisticated conspiracy - someone was negligent and shit hit the fan.

Twofer: Not only deflect blame from actual problem but also raise funding for anti-cyberwarfare boondoggle!

All ships should be keeping a physical lookout at all times, it can only be complete incompetence at work. Pretty pathetic of a warship cannot steer clear of such a large vessel. Clearly it would pretty easy for an enemy to attack them if they are thus incompetent