A U.S. Navy chief who wanted the internet so she and other enlisted officers could scroll social media, check sports scores and watch movies while deployed had an unauthorized Starlink satellite dish installed on a warship and lied to her commanding officer to keep it secret, according to investigators.
Internet access is restricted while a ship is underway to maintain bandwidth for military operations and to protect against cybersecurity threats.
The Navy quietly relieved Grisel Marrero, a command senior chief of the littoral combat ship USS Manchester, in August or September 2023, and released information on parts of the investigation this week.
Serious question: Was this actually a likely or possible security risk?
Yes, it is a likely risk. Having an unauthorized broadcast signal is a security risk because it can be used to locate and target the ship, allows for crew to communicate with the outside world without the oversight that they would normally have, and is outside the control of the ship’s command.
There are many valid reasons for the military to be limited to authorized channels for communication.
Very yes. They could reveal their location for starters, which could spoil a mission and put lives at risk, but if they use the same device on both this and the ships network, you risk compromising the ship’s network or even the Navy itself, giving our enemies all kinds of sensitive info.
We are in the midst of a world war being waged in cyberspace and the US is losing. Incidents like this are a genuine threat.
I was assuming they had their own hidden network going. I can’t imagine they would be dumb enough to mess with the existing ship network.
I don’t know the exact details of their setup but I would imagine if they have phones on the ship there’s a network they can connect to on the ship that’s not their starlink internet.
Aside from being able to possibly identify the starlink waveforms with passive RF surveillance or being able to identify the location of the ship through hacking spacex or their satellites, if they went back and forth between being connected on their phones to the ship network and the internet, their phones could have been compromised, leaving the possibility also of them being a perfect pivot point for hackers interested in exfilling important government secrets.
Overall just very bad opsec for a ship and definitely not a good idea.
Important government secrets will be strictly separated from personal/civilian devices. The only classified information being transmitted by personal devices is the location and human knowledge of the owners.
Do we know these are civilian phones? My assumption was these are not civilian phones because why let them bring their phones if there’s no cell network to operate on and no internet.
Edit: You might be right it mentions they can get Internet when it’s not underway so maybe they have their civilian phones. I am not in the navy so I don’t know the procedures. Still bad cuz of the other reasons plus some about giving them the ability to target those networks from a deauth’d perspective but yeah the last reason might not be the case.
It wouldn’t shock me tho if they still had access to some like nonclassified but controlled info too on their phones.