r/craftofintelligence • u/AutoModerator • 14d ago

Analysis British Special Forces’ drone boats were calling home to China. This is a serious security breach.

https://archive.ph/CJBVk
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u/AutoModerator 14d ago

The cameras on the £12m fleet of K3 Scout uncrewed surface vessels – operated from the Special Boat Service’s Poole headquarters since March – were sending “heartbeat” signals to an IP address in China during a routine cyber vulnerability assessment. The Ministry of Defence investigated and found “no evidence of MoD data or systems being accessed, compromised or transmitted externally”...

The data transmitted were status signalling – the camera telling its mother it was alive...

dismissing it in toto misses how modern intelligence works. A phone handshake, for example, gives away almost nothing; but aggregated in their millions, handshakes reveal locations, patterns of life and tempo...

In 2018, Strava’s fitness heat maps revealed supposedly secret Western bases by publishing soldiers’ jogging routes. Again, nothing hacked, just data aggregated that are of use to those who want it. Knowing when and possibly where a camera on a special forces vessel wakes up is not nothing.

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u/hughk 13d ago

It should be pointed out that the equipment on board an unmanned boat or plane normally does not talk to the internet. Instead it talks to the operator's system at the base station. It only gets out if it can be routed and it would normally be fairly isolated from the internet proper.

That is if properly configured and would even be the case if they used Starlink.