Could The USS McCain Have Been Hacked?

Some had speculated back when it happened:

The collision of guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain with a tanker near Singapore was the fourth accident involving ships from the US Navy’s 7th fleet in less than a year.

Two of the incidents — collisions involving the McCain and the USS Fitzgerald earlier this summer — have left a total of 17 sailors dead or missing, more than the 11 service members killed in Afghanistan so far this year. ..

But the number of accidents involving warships in the western Pacific — during “the most basic of operations” — has stirred concern that outside factors are affecting the ships and their crews.

“There’s something more than just human error going on because there would have been a lot of humans to be checks and balances” when transiting the Strait of Malacca, the narrow, heavily trafficked waterway the McCain was approaching, Jeff Stutzman, a former Navy information warfare specialist, told McClatchy.

“I don’t have proof, but you have to wonder if there were electronic issues,” said Stutzman, who is now chief intelligence officer for cyber-intelligence service Wapack Labs.

Adm. John Richardson, the chief of naval operations, tweeted on Monday that there were “no indications right now” of “cyber intrusion or sabotage.” But, he added, the “review will consider all possibilities…”

Experts have downplayed the likelihood of such attacks on US warships, noting that infiltrating Navy guidance systems would be very hard to do and instead citing human negligence or error as likely causes. Others have dismissed the likelihood of state-directed attacks on ships at sea, noting that such efforts would be a misuse of resources, strategically unwise, and generally harmful to maritime conduct.

But recent high-profile cyberattacks around the world have brought new attention to the security of maritime navigation, which is highly reliant on computer networks.

The US Navy uses encrypted navigation systems that would be difficult to hack or deceive, and there’s no sign satellite communications were at fault in the McCain’s collision. But there is technology out there to misdirect GPS navigation — typically through a process known as “spoofing” that leaves the system thinking it is somewhere it’s not.

The software and electronic gear needed to spoof a GPS system has become easier to get in recent years, particularly for private or nonstate actors.

In 2013, a team of graduate students led by Todd Humphreys, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and satellite-navigation expert, were able to spoof the GPS on an $80 million yacht, directing it hundreds of yards off course without the system detecting the change.

In late June, GPS signals for about 20 ships in the eastern Black Sea were manipulated, with navigation equipment on the ships, though seeming to be functioning correctly, saying the ships were located 20 miles inland. An attack on thousands of computers later that month also disrupted shipping around the world.

And now this:

A U.S. guided missile destroyer’s deadly collision with an oil tanker near Singapore in 2017 was caused by “a sudden turn” made by the warship that put it in the path of the commercial vessel, said a report by the Singapore government on Thursday…

“The collision between the USS John S McCain (JSM) and Alnic MC (AM) as they were transiting through the Singapore Strait happened because of a sudden turn to Port by JSM, which caused it to head into the path of AM,” the report said.

The sudden turn was due to “a series of missteps” that took place at the control of the John S. McCain that unintentionally increased the rate of the vessel’s turn, the report by the Transport Safety Investigation Bureau said…

The John S McCain’s sister ship, guided missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald, almost sank off the coast of Japan in June last year after colliding with a Philippine container ship. The bodies of seven U.S. sailors were recovered after that incident.

It seemed strange both the McCain and her sister ship would both be in such impressive collisions. It seems stranger still at least one of them was due to a sudden turn into the path of the ship it collided with. A sudden turn at exactly the wrong moment can happen, but everything coming together perfectly when there were more opportunities for it to not come together perfectly would seem to whittle back the probability of an innocent explanation.

But the nice thing is that with a competent and patriotic President, you know whatever happened is being dealt with masterfully.

Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because there is no substitute for a God Emperor