Chinese hackers penetrated the computers of an unnamed Department of Defense contractor, stealing information from the Naval Undersea Warfare Center.
Yesterday brought stunning news of yet another security lapse by our Navy. As reported by The Washington Post, Chinese hackers in the first two months of this year penetrated the computers of an unnamed defense contractor, “stealing massive amounts of highly sensitive data related to undersea warfare” from the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island.
NUWC (“new-ick”), as it’s called by sailors, handles sensitive and classified projects for the Navy’s submarine force, which just happens to be one of the few areas where the U. S. Navy still holds important advantages over its Chinese rival. As China’s rapidly expanding navy increasingly contests American naval dominance in the Western Pacific, our submarine force retains an important technological and tactical edge over Beijing—one that may just have been fatally compromised.
The hackers, who belonged to the Ministry of State Security, cleared out an astonishing amount of defense information such as “secret plans to develop a supersonic anti-ship missile for use on U. S. submarines by 2020” according to the Post, as well as “614 gigabytes of material relating to a closely held project known as Sea Dragon, as well as signals and sensor data, submarine radio room information relating to cryptographic systems, and the Navy submarine development unit’s electronic warfare library.” Since one gigabyte is equivalent to about a thousand good-sized books, roughly a half-million pages of text, this was an astonishingly large compromise.
While the loss of plans for a hush-hush super-missile is bad enough, the rest of what’s been handed to Beijing looks even worse. Sea Dragon, which the Pentagon has already spent $300 million on, is a secret Navy undersea warfare program initiated in 2015 and based on “disruptive offensive capability.” Much of that classified work has been done in Groton, Connecticut, which is home to the Navy’s submarine force, where more than a dozen nuclear-propelled attack submarines are based. Sea Dragon is considered a critical enabler for the U. S. Navy in any war against China, so its compromise may have grave consequences.
So too does the loss of NUWC’s electronic warfare library, which is a classified collection of all kinds of data about electronic signatures and countermeasures. This is also an area where our advantage over the Chinese navy, once significant, has been gradually slipping—and may now be lost altogether.
What really jumps out at any anyone who’s ever worked in intelligence, however, is the mention of the loss of cryptographic systems relating to submarine communications.
