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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I think the next step is to call for a criminal investigation into Elon Musk for installing spyware on a US Warship, and get him charged with espionage for the Russians or Chinese.
For most of the article, I was wondering why people cared so much about some random network, they'll go to the trouble of searching for and writing suggestions about it. People usually aren't that interested in the network infrastructure at government facilities.
That's some pretty significant context the writer didn't even know until informed by a reader.