That seems like a significant security risk
Probably not for the reason you think.
Like, it wouldn’t be patched into anything official
But it means Musk knew where that ship was 24/7, and I’m pretty sure that’s why Ukraine’s military stopped using it. Musk tipped off Putin to troop movements.
It’s emmitting radio signals that an enemy could use to help locate the ship.
What?
Surface ships are in constant communication with stuff…
You can’t just find a signal in the middle of the ocean. Musk can find a starlink signal tho, because he can see what Starlink connects to and it’s gps location.
Yeah but if they go on mission and “go dark” then you still have this starlink thing that may or may not be disabled by the person smuggling it on board. It may also be connected to official things if the owner has bad intentions, or if someone else who does finds it and co-opts it.
There is a lot that could go wrong with unauthorized radio transmission equipment on a warship, and not all of it is obvious.
You can’t connect a star link to siprnet.
The worst a bad actor could do is constantly transmitting location and other combat data.
You can’t connect a star link to siprnet.
Can you connect a computer? Because if so, that same computer can then be connected to the starlink, no?
I know absolutely nothing about secure government networking, I’m just kind of assuming that something has to be able to connect to both individually and also simultaneously.
sipr is very strict about what it is letting connect to it. Which is why you rarely hear about breaches. Notable incidents like Manning or Snowden both involved usage of physical media, which has been severely restricted since. Plus Snowden was an admin, and not on SIPRNet, but some NSA systems.
To add, SIPRNet is entirely isolated from NIPRNet or the Internet.
It’s as easy as plugging in the wrong cable.
Ships absolutely practice turning everything off.
Depends on where your sensors are and how much dispersion the dish has. If you are flying a surveillance plane into the “beam” then you can passively spot the ship.
You say that like Elon is personally looking at that information.
Presumably, there would be a large number of people at the company with access to that information, all of whom could be bribed or otherwise persuaded to share it.
No they actually do go dark sometimes for exactly this reason. Of course there’s always some signal source but it’s the difference between lighting up like a Christmas tree and running a single IR light.
You can’t just find a signal in the middle of the ocean.
Uh, this was the primary way the Allies defeated the U-Boats in WWII.
Musk tipped off Putin to troop movements
Wait he did? Can you provide a source for this? I can only find information about him stopping starlink service in crimea
They can’t, because it doesn’t exist.
Which also doesn’t definitely mean it didn’t happen.
That doesn’t matter. What even is your point?
The reason I think is because any unofficial and potentially unsecured communications access point seems like a vulnerability. If some moron posts a picture using that unofficial access point I’d be worried it could be traced to the ship’s location.
It wouldn’t be… Until it is.
Yeah with how many leaks come from war thunder players… lol
We need to insert egregiously wrong Russian hardware into War Thunder so the real specs will be leaked
Next up: somebody installs unauthorized Starlink on warship so they can play War Thunder on deployment.
I’m not convinced that’s not exactly what this particular starlink device was for
No it just wouldn’t.
Like, are you imagining a modern US warship doesn’t have internet 24/7?
This was for porn and maybe streaming services and social media, but mostly porn.
It wasn’t for any official use, because they have that covered.
You’re acting like surface ships are submarines…
Like, are you imagining a modern US warship doesn’t have internet 24/7?
last I checked, no, they don’t. they had shitty service while in port, and not much else.
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2023/12/29/new-in-2024-better-wi-fi-for-sailors/
fuck mate they only recently started giving their people access ON SHORE.
https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2024-01-25/navy-free-wi-fi-pilot-program-12796438.html
so no, I don’t think for the average sailor a US warship provides internet access 24/7
That article is about wifi for personal use…
And the second one is about it being free and you’re acting like they didn’t have Internet before then?
so no, I don’t think for the average sailor a US warship provides internet access 24/7
Yeah man, you have zero idea what people are talking about about.
That article is about wifi for personal use…
do you think the starlink terminal in the OP article was for military use?? bwahahaha
Yeah man, you have zero idea what people are talking about about.
ok buddy, have a nice life.
I said:
This was for porn and maybe streaming services and social media, but mostly porn.
And on your second reply you said:
do you think the starlink terminal in the OP article was for military use?? bwahahaha
I stand by my original assessment after your first comment:
Yeah man, you have zero idea what people are talking about
Because you literally don’t understand the conversation
Are you ever not a dickhead?
Whether they have wifi on ship or not isn’t the issue. Sometimes, when a ship goes into an operation, they will turn off all signals except passive or directed signals so that they can’t easily be detected. Having a communications signal that isn’t under the control of the ship’s officers is a huge security risk during operations.
Someone is going to be court martialed over this.
Everybody knew were the ship was, because at that time star link usage by area was shown publicly. There was map online that showed all clients online.
When did they stop using starlink?
They didn’t, the commenter is making things up.
It was exactly the reason I was thinking
Musk tipped off Putin to troop movements.
I’m sorry, this made me laugh. Is that a widely accepted conspiracy theory in this community? That Elon Musk is a Russian spy?
Did you miss the part where he sent a militarized Cyber Truck to a Russian war criminal, or are you conveniently ignoring it?
The Russian war criminal stated he got it from musk but that hasn’t been confirmed and I don’t think we should be taking Kadyrov’s word as truth on anything he’s a literal war criminal.
What about the Russian oligarchs backing twitter?
If Musk isn’t a Russian asset, it’s only because he’s a Saudi asset. And there’s no reason he can’t be both.
I feel like every military is full of technological babies acting out security theatre with each other while everything is totally hacked.
And I’m sure whoever put it there faced way more harsher penalties than a certain someone who willfully hid highly classified documents in his bathroom for months and lied about it to investigators.
Just like a certain someone who had classified documents that they weren’t even supposed to have without a handler!
According to Navy Times, reduction in rank. According to my experience, likely going to be told they can’t re-enlist after the end of their current term. Likely shipped stateside and in charge of mowing the lawn somewhere.
What’s better is that, thanks to Elon Musk, “STINKY” is the default name for its Starlink wifi. These people didn’t even change that.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-starlink-wifi-stinky
Don’t worry! I’m sure the default username and password didn’t get changed either.
They did, because they were charging people for access to it.
Can’t speak to starlink specifically, but I know some shittier router brands would often reset to factory defaults every time you updated the firmware. Can easily see starlink doing that with a pushed firmware with the expectation some additional cell phone app would restore the correct settings.
So they very well might have turned off broadcasting but it got popped back on while they were on shift and it was detected.
Nah, Starlink doesn’t reset the Wi-Fi SSID for a firmware update.
He’s so weirdly childish.
He’s so weird
ly childish.
To make matters even worse…
The chiefs found that the Wi-Fi signal coming off the Starlink satellite transceiver couldn’t cover the entire ship, so during a stop in Pearl Harbor, they bought “signal repeaters and cable” to extend coverage.
This many chiefs (not rank-and-file, chiefs), putting this much effort into breaking Navy protocol, together, is crazy. And for what? Memes?
I know deployment at sea can be boring but Jesus fucking Christ, read a damn book or something.
The source story is worth a read.
Marrero’s background is in Navy intelligence, and she earned a master’s degree in business administration with a concentration in information security and digital management
Incredible.
she soon changed the “STINKY” Wi-Fi network name to another moniker that looked like a wireless printer — even though no such general-use wireless printers were present on the ship
Why not just switch off broadcasting the SSID?
[The CO and XO] then conducted another sweep inside the ship. Although the network that appeared to be a wireless printer appeared on their personal devices during their search, neither made additional inquiries regarding that network
No-one’s coming out of this looking good.
Marrero’s secret Starlink dish was removed the same day, and Marrero told another unidentified crew member the next day that it was authorized for in-port use — prompting sailors to re-install the illegal Starlink.
It just keeps going!
To be fair, if the lead NCO of a unit is just going to flat out lie then a lot of people are going to believe it. I can’t imagine being a lower NCO or enlisted and thinking command actually authorized the chiefs to break operational security for entertainment, but only them. Every chief in that crew should be busted and flagged against promotion again. The investigation was completely right to say if they didn’t know, they should have.
I may have missed it in this article, though I believe I read elsewhere, that she got busted down one rank and that’s it. I know military in general is having retention and recruitment issues, but to me this is more than just a busting down offense. That the senior enlisted on a ship would so nonchalantly disregard OPSEC demonstrates either a clear lack of understanding, or worse, something more nefarious.
We saw a naval officer relieved of command for having the scope backwards on his rifle. This, to me, rises to a much higher level.
We saw a naval officer relieved of command for having the scope backwards on his rifle.
Well in that case, it was just a matter of bad optics.
The door is over there, good day Sir.
Take my upvote and get out of my sight.
Didn’t spot that one coming
Gotta keep your eye on the target
Yeah and that destroyer CO relieved of command for letting his sailors get treatment for COVID (before we had a vaccine) but this sailor just gets busted a rank for breaching OPSEC?! It’s not like she did it for fun, she’s probably compromised by some foreign actor. I’ve heard stories of the military making dumb decisions but damn.
There’s a lot of punishment that doesn’t show up in the top line in the military. She may be flagged to lose her security clearance, (dishonesty, incompetence, and corruption) which would be the end of her career. They may also outright flag her as not eligible for re-enlistment. She’s certainly not ever going to live that down and it’s not a counseling form that disappears in six months. I’d be very surprised if she ever promotes again.
All that said, where I was, in the infantry, lying to your commander like that, while endangering the unit, would be either an Other Than Honorable discharge or a Big Chicken Dinner. (Bad Conduct discharge, do not pass go, do not bother with the VA, do not collect retirement, hope future employers never ask about your discharge)
The levels of incompetence.
First thought I had after read through, how much did that masters cost and you didn’t learn that you can turn off the broadcast name so only people who know it’s there can connect? Probably not even a real degree, freakonomjcs did an episode maybe 10 years ago that said probably 5% of degrees are fake, bet it’s 20% now, lying is culturally through the roof.
Having an understanding of technology generically and knowing how specific technologies work are vastly different things. The first takes great effort. The second is done by a nerd who can’t sleep and is curious. If you didn’t do the second then you don’t know anything about that specific thing.
MBAs should be renamed Master’s in Bullshit Administration.
Here’s the meat and potatoes of the article.
In 2023, they decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to secretly bolt a Starlink terminal to the “O-5 level weatherdeck” of a US warship.
They called the resulting Wi-Fi network “STINKY”—and when officers on the ship heard rumors and began asking questions, the leader of the scheme brazenly lied about it. Then, when exposed, she went so far as to make up fake Starlink usage reports suggesting that the system had only been accessed while in port, where cybersecurity and espionage concerns were lower.
Rather unsurprisingly, the story ends badly, with a full-on Navy investigation and court-martial.
Good. At a company, you get your ass fired if they catch you using non-approved equipment on company infrastructure. It can lead to leaks and infiltration, and lost of revenue.
In the military, that’s people’s lives!
when officers on the ship heard rumors
Lol not only is this an incredible violation of security, they couldn’t even keep their fucking mouths shut about it.
average starlink user, worse than arch users
Sailors on the ship then began finding the STINKY network and asking questions about it.
Oh, c’mon. it is trivial to make an SSID “hidden” for any networking tech that you have administrative control over. That way, only those “in the know” will know the SSID name to type in, in order to access said wireless network. It would not be “discoverable” by standard wireless-connectivity gear such as the default wifi interface in mobile phones.
Hidden WiFi networks are not actually hidden in the literal sense. They still broadcast beacons that your wifi chip will see as basically “hidden network beacon lives here”. Your network connect interface just decides not to show you a list with a bunch of useless “(hidden)” entries you can’t do anything with.
Also, when a new client wants to connect to the hidden network, the first thing it does is broadcast an unencrypted message saying “HEY, I’M LOOKING FOR [hidden network name]” so it’s completely trivial to unveil the name of hidden networks given enough time.
That’s why I put that term in quotes, and was specific about default networking interfaces. I didn’t go into detail because that confuses a lot of people.
Source: working with wireless networks professionally for pretty much the last quarter century.
Yea, that was a good editorial choice on your part. I did pick up on your scare quotes, I just thought it would be good to tack on the additional info “below the fold” because it’s just baffling to me that 20 years later the majority of people still think they’re hackerman when they make WiFi “hidden”.
I think it’d be more for obfuscation than completely hiding it. As long as there are other hidden networks on the ship you just name it something generic that blends in. I mean this whole thing is a really stupid idea, but naming it something like “COM.NAB_ISO:4133” would draw less attention.
It’s absolutely mind-boggling that the existing WiFi infrastructure on the military ship didn’t trigger any alarms. This is the kind of thing that you can get from “pro-sumer” grade hardware/software like Ubiquiti, let alone corporate-grade or military-grade stuff. The feature is called “Rogue Access Point Detection” and it’s built into literally every WiFi solution on the market. Like, your local library is analyzing this stuff it’s that basic.
Edit: To more directly address your point, the name shouldn’t matter at all. Rogue AP detection doesn’t give a shit about the display names of things, it looks at the actual hardware addresses and compares them to known things that are owned by your network.
Yup, I did some on-campus IT work while I was in college and it was super trivial to detect when people would have their own networks in the dorms
Wasn’t that allowed?
At mine it was not. Hotspots and the like that stayed up for too long were flagged and action was taken to have them disabled and the student reprimanded.
Well, I can understand that APs wouldn’t be allowed since having lots of APs in one space makes it worse for everyone.
Wired should be allowed though.
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Between Trump stealing national security secrets and shit like this, it’s honestly shocking the USA hasn’t already become a full-fledged fascist hell-hole. It’s currently only half-fledged.
But seriously, it must be fucking child’s play for other nations to spy on us with dumb fucking shit like this happening.
Hey, give us a chance. We have another election right around the corner and things are really looking good for a solid commitment to fully flegged hell-holism.
Vote for my guy, trust me bro!
crux of the US politics
Ya mean like ppl using classified information in World of Tanks forums to prove a point… more than once?
The weakest link is always the lowest common denominator. I’m pretty sure that the other armies around the world have their fair share of idiots too.
Oh it’s the same with other countries too. We all regularly have breaches due to the dumbest shit. Just ask the War Thunder community. It’s about time for them to have another one.
Reminds me of Sgt Bilko.
i was wondering why would you choose such a stupid WiFi access point name, then I read that it was Elon musk that decided that the default starlink AP name has to be that stupid so people would change it
My ISP gave me an access point called CSP218891F Which I’m rather worried about.
The fact that they didn’t even try to hide their ssid (or at least, the report doesn’t say they did) shows how stupid people can be with cybersecurity.
Apparently “STINKY” is the default StarLink SSID (Another Musk joke), so yeah…
To be fair, this is a navy ship. If they got the sniffers out and found a hidden one then the officers would be tearing the ship apart to find it right then and there. Hiding in plain view was the better choice.
To be mean, because these chiefs deserve it, Stinky is apparently the default name. These fucking geniuses left the default name up rather than try to camouflage it as a legitimate network. So I’m pretty sure none of the top part went through their smooth brains. They just assumed it would go unnoticed. Then they assumed they had enough privilege to make the enlisted think this was proper. Forgetting just how pugnacious the middle enlisted can be when they feel something is both unfair and know it’s against regs. (They will make it their life’s mission to humble a leader, and they win more often than not)
can we just fucking all take a break for a month? just have things go to being boring?
I attended a fucking ethics of ai talk at my work, only to run into a fucking knockoff nazi complaining about the founding fathers images being generated with black people, and talking about how silicon valley is too left wing.
either you’re so stupid that you don’t understand it’s a fucking alt-right dog whistle, or you’re a fucking nazi who gets very, very upset if you see a black person in any context. Either way, just shut the fuck up.
What really surprises me is that the ships equipment never picked up on those unauthorized signals. Hell they can pick up pavarotti in pearl harbour on their sonar. (Red oktober reference) . but they cant pick up multiple unknown signals in the 2.4 and 5 GHz band
Command Senior Chief
The person who came up with the scheme is also the most senior NCO on the ship. All the enlisted people in charge of monitoring that activity knew, they just knew not to ask questions.You would be surprised how much pull an E-8 or E-9 has in the military.
Can confirm was an O-3 to O-5 and if an E-5 or above was talking, I shut up and listened. Those guys get shit done.
Yeah, my dad eventually found himself as an E-9 in the USAF. He spent the latter portion of his career, which was jet engine mechanic, originally, going to different NATO countries and training people on equipment they were buying from the US, consulting them on opening, and operating, engine rooms, and hangars, and implementation of these roles in bases on foreign land, and in FOB situations. He said it was hard not to suffer imposter syndrome when you are routinely in board rooms filled with top brass, from around the world, and they are listening TO YOU. It stressed him out, a lot.
Believe me, being an officer from the ages of 20-24 there was a fuckton of imposter syndrome. I’m still shocked that they gave me the job they did. The stress was one of the reasons I left.
Yeah, same with my dad. Since he had enlisted he had gotten a masters, so they wanted to make him an officer, starting at some decent rank. However they wanted him to continue on with the types of locations he was being stationed at. He did a lot of work on test, and spy, aircraft, and did all that consulting travel. So they kept putting him in basically the middle of nowhere, but locations that either had a lot of traffic for things like spy aircraft, or they were geographically kinda centered, to travel between a number of locations, to work at, with that place being home base. He said he would do it if they sent him back to Vegas, or put him in Hawaii, or Edwards in southern California, or one of the major spots in Virginia, something other than arctic outposts, and a super rural areas. At the time we were stationed at Mountain Home AFB in Idaho… He hated it. But no, they wanted him to stay there for a few years, then get moved a rather remote location in the midwest. So he retired after 22 years.
and you had wished he owned a Starlink beacon?
This was the 80s, my guy
And this situation shows an inherent weakness of a military culture which demands one pretend a dumbass isn’t a dumbass just because of their badge collection.
That movie is not very realistic.
You’re telling me that Sean Connery isn’t Russian? He was so convincing in the role.
One ping only.
If only they didn’t make them speak broken Russian (I suppose they used a dictionary with simplified transcriptions and maybe even a phrasebook). All the effort to do it with the less than satisfactory result could have been avoided. Even SG-1 aliens speak English.
As a Russian speaker, I wonder if there’s a version with only those parts dubbed to Russian.
Even SG-1 aliens speak English.
Yeah and then they had counselor troi pretend to be a Russian.
Are you telling me that some things do react well to bullets?
Wow just wow. Mind is blown. If thats your response you probably have no idea what my point was
the ship’s* equipment
*skiff
Still, the ambassador had nothing on senior enlisted crew members of the littoral combat ship USS Manchester, who didn’t like the Navy’s restriction of onboard Internet access. In 2023, they decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to secretly bolt a Starlink terminal to the “O-5 level weatherdeck” of a US warship. They called the resulting Wi-Fi network “STINKY”—and when officers on the ship heard rumors and began asking questions, the leader of the scheme brazenly lied about it. Then, when exposed, she went so far as to make up fake Starlink usage reports suggesting that the system had only been accessed while in port, where cybersecurity and espionage concerns were lower. Rather unsurprisingly, the story ends badly, with a full-on Navy investigation and court-martial. Still, for half a year, life aboard the Manchester must have been one hell of a ride.
But wait! There’s more!
Some McHale’s Navy shit only with actual consequences.
