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.
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.
The degree of incompetence needed for SIGINT/ELINT operations to fail to discover such a transceiver for 6+ months strains credibility.
I’m guessing this is a ruse to convince adversaries that the Navy can’t detect Starlink transceivers even when they are aboard their own ships. This is much more likely to be disinformation intended to drive adversaries to use Starlink than it is to be a legitimate failure of intelligence gathering.
Not sure why.
Security professionals are constantly complaining about insiders violating security policies for stupid reasons.
Security publications and declassified documents are full of breaches that took way too long to discover.
The Navy may have great security protocols but it’s full of humans that make mistakes. As they say, if you invent a foolproof plan, the universe will invent a better fool.
Ok, so this is a bit different from taping your password to your monitor. Security has a problem with you doing that, but unless they come to your workstation, they have no way of knowing that you do this.
ELINT is kinda like a security camera, but instead of seeing lights, it sees transmitters. You know the frequencies of the communications transmitters on Navy ships, let’s say they are analogous to blue lights. You know the frequencies of their radars, let’s say they are green. During normal operation, you’re expecting to see blue and green “lights” from your ship, and the other ships in your task force.
Starlink does not operate on the same frequencies as comms and radar. The “light” it emits is bright red, kinda like the blinking lights you see on cell towers at night.
So, you’re sitting at the security desk, monitoring your camera feeds… And you just don’t notice a giant red blinky light, strong enough to be seen from space, on the ship next to you in formation?
You’re telling me that this warship never ran any EMCON drills, shutting off all of the “lights” it knows about, and looking to see if any shipboard transmitters remain unsecured?
You’re right, I would expect users to bend and break unmonitored security protocols from time to time. I expect them to write down their password. I expect them to share their password, communicating it over insecure networks that aren’t monitored by the security department. But operating a Starlink transmitter is basically equivalent to having the Goodyear blimp orbit your office building, projecting your password on its side for everyone to see.
The idea that ELINT operators missed seeing it for this long doesn’t seem likely.
Look at what her rank was, she was Chief of Ship. She also lied about what it was and was allowing other enlisted, likely sigint/elint to use the starlink for streaming away from port.
Simple low level fuckery on a naval vessel. The softest part of security are the squishy humans.
Ok, I don’t think you read what I wrote.
Everytime you read “Starlink”, I want you to think about a flashing anti-collision beacon on a radio tower. Because that is what a Starlink transceivers looks like to every ELINT operator aboard, and on every nearby ship. Imagine a ship with a giant red blinky light on it, because that’s what an ELINT technician would be seeing.
She would have had to have recruited every ELINT technician and supervisor aboard every vessel they sailed with to make this happen.
I’m surprised they didn’t hide the SSID… It’s likely nobody would have even found the network then.
Effectively they did through obfuscation. The Command Chief renamed it to look like their wireless printers. She did that because so many more junior people (relative to the Chief’s Mess) complained that the officers tried to check (with their phones) for some wifi Internet. They couldn’t find it because they thought it was a printer. The Command Chief is obviously trusted since she’s the most senior enlisted but she’s also the one that lead the entire scheme. When asked directly by the Commander, she denied it existed, so after not finding it, they just assumed it was a rumor. So, they had a ship-wide call and told everyone that there was no rogue Internet access point on the ship.
It took months because when a tech from a port they were at was installing a Starshield transceiver they physically saw the Starlink transceiver.
You could easily scan for hidden SSIDs. It might not show up in your phone’s wifi list, but that’s by design. The traffic is still there and discoverable. Even with an app like WiFiman (made by Ubiquiti).
How many regular people would know that, though?
These aren’t regular people, these are navy soldiers on a high tech warship, I have to imagine their IT would know how to find rogue wifi APs.
Disabling the wifi SSID broadcast might even increase the number of communication attempts between devices. Because all devices then must actively search for the network.
The original article says there were over 15 people involved https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/
With that many people, it’s only a matter of time before someone spills the beans.
There are several steps they could have taken to make it much harder to discover. I expect more and more people will take those steps and we’ll never hear about it.