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posted by martyb on Wednesday October 10 2018, @04:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the who's-aiming-that-thing,-anyhow? dept.

Submitted via IRC for chromas

Pentagon's new next-gen weapons systems are laughably easy to hack | ZDNet

New computerized weapons systems currently under development by the US Department of Defense (DOD) can be easily hacked, according to a new report published today.

The report was put together by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), an agency that provides auditing, evaluation, and investigative services for Congress.

Congress ordered the GAO report in preparation to approve DOD funding of over $1.66 trillion, so the Pentagon could expand its weapons portfolio with new toys in the coming years.

But according to the new report, GAO testers "playing the role of adversary" found a slew of vulnerabilities of all sort of types affecting these new weapons systems.

"Using relatively simple tools and techniques, testers were able to take control of systems and largely operate undetected, due in part to basic issues such as poor password management and unencrypted communications," GAO officials said.

The report detailed some of the most eye-catching hacks GAO testers performed during their analysis.

In one case, it took a two-person test team just one hour to gain initial access to a weapon system and one day to gain full control of the system they were testing.

Some programs fared better than others. For example, one assessment found that the weapon system satisfactorily prevented unauthorized access by remote users, but not insiders and near-siders. Once they gained initial access, test teams were often able to move throughout a system, escalating their privileges until they had taken full or partial control of a system.

In one case, the test team took control of the operators' terminals. They could see, in real-time, what the operators were seeing on their screens and could manipulate the system. They were able to disrupt the system and observe how the operators responded.

Another test team reported that they caused a pop-up message to appear on users' terminals instructing them to insert two quarters to continue operating.

Multiple test teams reported that they were able to copy, change, or delete system data including one team that downloaded 100 gigabytes, approximately 142 compact discs, of data.

The report claims the DOD documented many of these "mission-critical cyber vulnerabilities," but Pentagon officials who met with GAO testers claimed their systems were secure, and "discounted some test results as unrealistic."


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 10 2018, @06:34PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 10 2018, @06:34PM (#747076)

    "Robbing a museum" is involved in the plan, but not at the "obtain 8-inch floppy disks" stage:

    https://www.ebay.com/itm/TEN-8-inch-32-hard-sectors-SSSD-floppy-disks-NOS-from-factory-sealed-bag-of-25/183468108702 [ebay.com]

    Robbing a museum comes in when you get to the "obtain a computer with which to write the data to the disks" stage of the "blow up the world" plan.

    (I didn't expect 8-inch disks to be so readily available either before I ran that search...)

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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday October 10 2018, @09:35PM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday October 10 2018, @09:35PM (#747152) Journal

    Does searching for 8" floppy disks put you on the Pentagon watch list? :-)

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 11 2018, @08:53AM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 11 2018, @08:53AM (#747342) Journal

      Perhaps. As a potential hire when the missile silos personnel retire.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford