The Navy’s newest combat ship could be hacked at any moment

USS Freedom.(AFP Photo / Jay Directo)

A Navy official told Reuters this week that although one of America’s newest littoral combat ships (LCS) has been deployed to spend eight months off the coast of Singapore, its computer network failed to prove itself as impenetrable during a recent round of testing.The United States Navy is spending $37 billion on a fleet of high-tech coastal warships, but a new report warns that those vessels are far from invulnerable when it comes to sophisticated cyberattacks.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the Navy official tells Reuters that a team of computer hacking experts was assembled to conduct penetration tests on the fleet’s lead ship, the USS Freedom, and found deficiencies in the boat’s networks when simulating an attack.

"We do these types of inspections across the fleet to find individual vulnerabilities, as well as fleet-wide trends," the official says in an article published this week.

Defense Department spokeswoman Jennifer Elzea responded to Reuters by confirming that the Pentagon's chief weapons test agency addressed "information assurance vulnerabilities" for the fleet in an assessment that has been provided to the Navy, but adds that the details of that report are classified.

Speaking to Bloomberg News, Elzea says that the Pentagon’s director of weapons testing “recommended those vulnerabilities be remediated without delay.”

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