this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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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.
There are regular unprotected Internet channels, and then there are secure networks like SIPRNet. Devices must not arbitrarily cross from one to the other. That's where a leak can happen. That's one thing I learned working for a company with an Army contract 20 years ago. Once a device was set up for secure access on the military network, our policy was to never have it touch the civilian Internet again. It had to be 100% verified destroyed at the end of its lifetime. I don't know details of how they handle it these days with mobile devices everywhere.
Wow that was super interesting! Thanks!
Doesn't really change much.
You NEVER connect to sensitive resources via wifi. Different orgs and levels have different rules about whether a device capable of wifi can even be in the same room, but the key is to not connect it to the secure network. This is commonly referred to as "an airgap". And if you are wondering how different ships can communicate with each other and The US? Don't ask questions!
For less sensitive resources? YOLO that shit. But it is also incredibly trivial to set up a security model where users cannot connect to arbitrary networks.
So StinkyNet would, presumably, only be usable by personal devices. Which should have absolutely nothing sensitive on them to begin with. And if anything on any of the ship's sensitive networks was even able to connect to StinkyNet then... the Navy done fucked up.
Which... might explain the rapid action to punish those who violated policy.
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.
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.
It was on its own hidden network, if it was on the existing network it would have been discovered a LOT sooner