Technology

60038 readers

2900 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

666

Navy officer lost job for secretly installing internet on warship to check social media (fortune.com)

submitted 3 months ago by ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net to c/technology@lemmy.world

147 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] CrystalRainwater@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago

Yes, right up until someone plugs in the wrong cable, sends an email to the wrong person, or plugs the wrong hard drive into a system. Then your phone rings and you have to talk to people you never want to talk to.

[–] CrystalRainwater@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.