Analysis | US Navy collisions stoke cyber threat fears that GPS systems can be ‘spoofed’ by hackers
John S. McCain collision off Singapore is US Navy’s fourth incident this year
The incident - the fourth involving a Seventh Fleet warship this year - occurred near the Strait of Malacca, a crowded 2.7 kilometre-wide waterway that connects the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea and accounts for roughly 25 per cent of global shipping.
“When you are going through the Strait of Malacca, you can’t tell me that a US Navy destroyer doesn’t have a full navigation team going with full lookouts on every wing and extra people on radar,” said Jeff Stutzman, chief intelligence officer at Wapack Labs, a New Boston, New Hampshire, cyber intelligence service.
“There’s something more than just human error going on because there would have been a lot of humans to be checks and balances,” said Stutzman, a former information warfare specialist in the Navy.
Ten American sailors are still missing.
Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral John Richardson, did not rule out cyber intrusion or sabotage as a cause of the fatal collision.