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.
I’m surprised they didn’t hide the SSID… It’s likely nobody would have even found the network then.
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.
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.