A recently-issued report from the Government Accountability Office indicates that U.S. weapons systems are full of cybersecurity vulnerabilities that could allow adversaries to shut them down or control them. “From 2012-2017, DoD testers routinely found mission-critical cyber vulnerabilities in nearly all weapons systems that were under development.” The report listed one case where a two-person team was able to access a weapon system within an hour and then taken full control of the system within a day. In another case, hackers used “a basic technique that most attackers would use and requires little knowledge or expertise” to hack a system. In many cases, the owners or developers were unaware that their systems had been hacked, and continued to believe they were secure. The Pentagon’s Operational Testing and Evaluating division conducted most of the testing, and concluded that the underlying problem is consistent disregard of the military concerning cybersecurity related to weapons systems. “Due to this lack of focus on weapons systems cybersecurity, DoD likely has an entire generation of systems that were designed and built without adequately considering cybersecurity.”
Source: GAO: Vulnerabilities Plague ‘Entire Generation’ of U.S. Weapons Systems – Nextgov
