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Good that’s a severe risk she* put everyone and the ship in. It was 17 officers in total and they attempted cover up
She
First off, not an officer, a high ranking enlisted(E-8) personal was the culprit.
Second, she was a Information systems technician. She literally dealt with making sure communication was safe and secure.
I know congress has to be involved to knock her down below E-7 but they need to get on that.
So she was an NCO and the writter was clueless. Ok.
And for that kind of opsec fuckup there really shouldn't there be discharge/prison time ?
If the military imprisoned soldiers for being dumb, there would be no military.
Exactly. You only imprison people for malicious actions. If they're just dumb, demote and reassign elsewhere.
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First off, not an officer, a high ranking enlisted(E-8) personal was the culprit.
Typically, anything E-4 or higher is considered a Non-Commisioned Officer.
EDIT further clarification: from my experience in the Canadian Army, what "Officers" means depends on context. Most often (and what !Bluefalcon@discuss.tchncs.de probably meant) it means just Commissioned Officers. Other times, it's anyone in leadership, including NCOs.
I totally understand where you're coming from. It's absolutely not uncommon to casually refer to high-rank NCOs as Officers (in Canada at least)
[Source: Family in CAF and RCMP]
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Guess what the letter O in NCO is, dummy.
The term officer, alone, as it stands in the headline, is reserved for commissioned officers. No one in the military would assume that headline was referring to an NCO.
The N also stands for Non
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Chiefs are enlisted, not officers. C'mon, AP, this is like day one stuff. Despite the name "petty officer" and term "non-commissioned officer", there's no such thing as an "enlisted officer".
Also, "stinky" was the default SSID on Starlink, not a secret code word they came up with.
Was gonna call you out for messing that up; warrant officers are officers, they just started out as enlisted men.
Then I realized we are talking navy ranks, and my best knowledge of that is from halo.
Enlisted dont even have ranks, they have rates. They also have a rating, which refers to your role, I.e the job you do.
Yes rates are used most of the time in forms of address. However you do have a rank, for example E-5 or Petty Officer Second Class. However when addressing enlisted you'd usually say something like CTM2, IT2 etc... Until you hit chief then you are just called Chief, or senior if you are a Senior Chief, Master Chief doesn't get abbreviated to Master for obvious reasons, and MCPON is usually referred to as "mic pon" phonetically for Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy.
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Again, my best knowledge of navy terminology comes from halo. Rank is th e term used in the army.
Yes, warrant officers are commissioned though. (Technically the most junior rank of Warrant Officer is a warrant from the branch secretary, not a commission, but it's effectively the same. All other warrant officer ranks, Chief Warrant Officer 2 and up, are commissioned by the president.)
Hence the officer in the title, yes.
Warrent officers are also generally insanely talented motherfuckers that had too much disdain for the bureaucracy of the military to start over as an 0-1, and instead sit in a weird middle ground of "so much talent they were elevated up to officers from the enlisted ranks by direct request."
That means that they are right, and you are wrong, and I mean that with complete respect.
The link below this parent with the pics shows tweets from Musk saying the point of naming it STINKY is to encourage customizing the name. I guess not everyone knew their LinkSys ID # in the dorms and/or doesn't immediately turn their wifi into a pun. Just in case anyone else found that default name to be suspicious. They're supposedly now back to just starlink
How the fuck did she think this was anything close to a good idea?! This shows a profound lack of good judgement, and a huge failure of both respect for her job and for the safety of the crew.
Yeah true, but tiktok
There's a much bigger story here.
Think about how hard it was to discover this access point. Even after it was reported and there was a known wi-fi network and the access point was known to be on a single ship, it took the Navy months to find it.
Starlink devices are cheap and it will be nearly impossible to detect them at scale. That means that anyone can get around censors. If the user turns off wi-fi, they'll be nearly impossible to detect. If they leave wi-fi on in an area with a lot of wi-fi networks it will also be nearly impossible to detect. A random farmer could have Starlink in their hut. A dissident (of any nation) could hide the dish behind their toilet.
As competing networks are launched, users will be able to choose from the least restricted network for any given topic.
But why was it hard? Surely they're accessing it w/ wifi, and scanning for wi-fi networks really isn't that hard. A military ship should have a good handle on what networks they expect, and they should be able to easily triangulate where the signal is coming from.
Also, military ships should have really strict accounting for what is brought on board. A Starlink receiver isn't particularly small, and it should be plainly obvious to security when that comes on-board.
I think it's awesome that Starlink is so accessible for the average joe, but that's a completely different topic than what's allowed on military property. This sounds like a pretty big, embarassing security fail for the US military, and more people than this individual should be reprimanded, if not fired.
The original article goes into more detail https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/
It sounds like there were over 15 people in on the scheme. At some point people noticed that there was some wi-fi network called "STINKY" and rumors started circulating about it. It took a while for those rumors to reach senior command. Then they changed the name to make it look like a printer, which further delayed the investigation.
It doesn't look like they actually scanned for the access point. I suspect that's because it would be hard on a ship. All the metal would reflect signals and give you a ton of false readings.
They only eventually found it when a technician was installing an authorized system (Starshield seems to be the version of Starlink approved for military use) and they discovered the unauthorized Starlink equipment.
The Starlink receivers have gotten fairly small. It seems like that was pretty easy to hide among all the other electronics on the ship.
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It was the Chief of the ship who installed it. She was the highest ranked enlisted person on the ship. She would have the access and ability to get just about anything on board that she wanted. The fact she was able to is easy to see. The fact the she was willing to and has obtained such a high rank is pretty impressive (and stupid).
Unless they just turn the satellites off over the country’s that don’t want them to avoid conflict or jam all signals because they do be that way.
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it took the Navy months to find it.
I'm surprised they didn't hide the SSID... It's likely nobody would have even found the network then.
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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.
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Anything Elon Musk can track is probably a security risk until he stops being the most divorced person to ever exist.
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Itself? Not really.
If a ship is close enough to pick up an SSID they are close enough for any number of other methods. And starlink is theoretically trusted by the us government.
But if they were actually locked down for a real mission (not the stuff you do to make people feel important) then we could have seen the same kinds of telegram leaks Russian has near constantly.
The GPS is recording where they are, which can report to things like fitness applications. These are not so secure and can identify where they are, have been, and likely will go next.
And if there is not immense amounts of "do not have a fucking fitbit" levels of warnings and policies, that is a problem for the US Navy itself. Because a lot of those will also cache data and send the last N days once they get back to shore.
Again, unless they were ACTUALLY doing sensitive stuff (rather than just "sensitive by default" to protect Leadership(TM) from having to think and make decisions) then we are looking at the same problem the russians have in Ukraine.
Otherwise? It is a policy violation, not a security violation, in and of itself. What people then share on social media is on them.
And a friendly reminder: Policy is made to minimize the risk of a security issue and you should follow it (if only because you are paid to). But it is VERY important to understand what you are actually protecting yourself from so that you understand if policy is even doing anything. Otherwise you get complete insanity as more and more bureaucrats and Leaders(TM) add bullshit so they can get a bonus for being "security minded".
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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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