A French aircraft carrier was tracked in real time via a sailor’s Strava activity, exposing a persistent operational security flaw. Le Monde revealed that France’s aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle was tracked in real time through an officer’s activity on the Strava app. A sailor unknowingly shared running data from the ship, exposing its location […]

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[–] 22 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Strava has to be one of the biggest opsec failures in recent years.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    War Thunder would like a word

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    Someone needs to post this running track on the War Thunder forums and claim that it could'nt be real as the deck is 5m shorter than the distance he ran between turns. They'll have a full set of blueprints for the ship by lunch time, not to mention classified information about the ship's speed and manouverability, armaments and navigation to disprove the assertion that it cant go that fast.

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  • [–] 16 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    So... He must have been using shipboard wifi. I can't imagine they're allowing private satellite internet solutions, and phone signals aren't going to cover very far from shore.

    Why would they not block things like Strava at the network level?

    This isn't just an OpSec failure by the sailor, but from whatever team handles shipboard communications as a whole.

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  • [–] 15 points 7 months ago

    Good pace at least

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  • 51 comments in c/technology@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 88 points 7 months ago (21 children)

    As funny as that is, something tells me it’s not that hard to spot an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean

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  • [–] 64 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (19 children)

    You have to be in visual range, or radar range if you have one, which is the horizon plus a bit more depending how high above sea level your are and how tall your target is.

    If you're on a ship, unless you're using an advanced radar that bounces signals against the ionosphere or you have a meteorological phenomena called an inversion which can curve your radar energy over the horizon a little bit, your radar horizon is surprisingly short, something around 12 nautical miles give or take. And the sea is big and Iran is quite far.

    This is one big reason why aircraft are used for surveillance at sea. They can go much higher than any ship's radar antenna mast every could be which significantly expands their radar horizon. They can also scan a huge area relatively quickly as they can travel much faster.

    Because if this fuck up, Iran now has the intel that the French carrier is approaching without even having to send an aircraft out to look for it. If they even still have the ability to do so at this point.

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  • [–] 32 points 7 months ago (10 children)

    So satellites can see my truck's plate but an aircraft carrier and it's escrow fleet are too... Small?

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  • [–] 35 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    Sort of. Satellite resources are surprisingly scarce, so a lot are focused where people are, i.e. land. Plus, for the imagery sats that are focused on the ocean, ships are also tiny in a literal ocean of blue. It's just a spec. While the resolution could be good, have fun looking for that spec. That's why most countries use signal collection to locate vessels at sea. (I'm over-simplifying a lot, but you get the picture)

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  • [–] 14 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (5 children)

    While the resolution could be good, have fun looking for that spec.

    Seems like an simple but tedious job. Something that a computer can do.

    Object detection algorithms are incredibly fast and can learn to tell the difference between an aircraft carrier and an ocean.

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  • [–] 12 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    There are a surprising amount of false positives when using object detection on maritime imagery. While a carrier is a spec, there are a ton of specs in the ocean that can look similar enough. Plus, weather has a huge hand to play. If it were always perfectly clear, then it's an easier problem, but one cloud can really mess up the detection. Ultimately, ship detection is a difficult problem (not intractable but still hard).

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    False positives are fine, you assign 1, 10, 50, 100 analysts to review hits. You only need to find it once, then the search area becomes incredibly small for each subsequent satellite pass.

    I'm not saying that it is easy, just that you don't need to have a surface ship within 15 nm in order to see it.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    I'm not saying that it is easy

    It kind of sounds like you're saying that. Anyways, there's a reason submarines exist

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    It is simple, it is not easy.

    'Take a picture of the entire ocean and look for ships' is simple, but executing that plan is not.

    It requires hundreds of millions of dollars of reconnaissance satellites, and an entire branch of personnel to operate and digest the information.

    This is why the US operates carrier battle groups instead of just sailing their carriers everywhere with a small escort. They can't hide, but they can pack enough offensive and defensive power into a tiny area to make most attacks infeasible.

    Anyways, there’s a reason submarines exist

    True, and even they're vulnerable when they surface (if they're moving), the v-shaped wake is also very detectable from space where satellites can detect wave heights within 3cm. It's not easy for humans to find, but with billions of dollars to spend on computers, these kinds of things are very much within the reach of sovereign nations.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    I agree with the premise of "simple but hard". However, I still want to underscore that large areas of the ocean will at any given time be covered in clouds or fog. Sure, once you find the ship the first time, you've narrowed your search radius significantly, but a ship that can move at 30 knots can move around 1500 nautical miles (2800 km) without being seen under just 48 hours of cloud cover. That means any intel on the position of a ship carrying weapons that can easily strike at ranges of 500-1000 km is fresh produce. Just a day after you spotted that ship, it can have moved almost 1500 km, and if you lose track of it under clouds during your next satellite pass, it can suddenly be 3000 km from where you last spotted it.

    What this means is that the "hard" element here is significant. Even the "simple" element becomes complicated by stuff like night time and cloud cover. All this taken into account, there are very few countries in the world with enough surveillance satellites and processing capacity to actually keep a pin on a ship at sea over any significant period of time.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    You still need to know where to point that spy satellite's camera at. If you take picture that covers hundreds of square kilometers then you don't have enough resolution to spot the ship but you can't zoom in much either because you don't know where to zoom.

    It's different with buildings because you know where they are.

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  • [–] 19 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    why don't ships at sea simply disguise themselves as a rock or shrubbery?

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  • [–] 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

    Or as a duck if they need to move.

    BTW sweden have some cool ship disguises.

    Edit: went looking for it, couldn't even find a photo.

    Yeah, that's how good they are.

    Found an old, not very effective but fun one:

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    The Swedish Navy's ships do have some bonkers designs, like massive barcodes printed on the side. It's so that when they get back to port they can scan the navy in.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago*

    Because if this fuck up, Iran now has the intel that the French carrier is approaching without even having to send an aircraft out to look for it.

    It wasn't exactly a secret, France publicly announced it was being moved to the eastern med

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  • [–] 39 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Same thing happen with unlisted FOBs in Afghanistan and the U.S. army. running apps have compromised opsec of a surprising amount of facilities.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago

    I remember reading that. My brother is in the AF, and through some system, they can get gear like Garmin Fenix watches that does GPS tracking and uploads to their cloud and can be synced with Strava. It's wild that stuff like this isn't strictly monitored to prevent this exact scenario.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago

    Yep. This has only been an issue for nearly a decade.

    The Strava Heat Map and the End of Secrets

    The revelations began unspooling at a rapid pace after Nathan Ruser, a student studying international security at the Australian National University, began posting his findings via Twitter on Saturday afternoon. In a series of images, Ruser pointed out Strava user activities potentially related to US military forward operating bases in Afghanistan, Turkish military patrols in Syria, and a possible guard patrol in the Russian operating area of Syria.

    Other researchers soon followed up with a dizzying array of international examples, based on cross-referencing Strava user activity with Google Maps and prior news reporting: a French military base in Niger, an Italian military base in Djibouti, and even CIA “black” sites. Several experts observed that the Strava heatmap seemed best at revealing the presence of mostly Western military and civilian operations in developing countries.

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  • [–] 34 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Merde! Macron's bodyguards reveal his location by sharing Strava data

    An investigation by Le Monde has shown that members of the Security Group for the Presidency of the Republic (GSPR) have been openly displaying their location on the popular software during their workout sessions.

    https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/29/macron_location_strava/

    will they learn one day?

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  • [–] 22 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Apparently strava is for posting your runs on social

    That sailor now got the runs

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    [–] 10 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    Imagine losing a carrier cuz one of the soldiers forgot to read the privacy notice on their smartwatch

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  • [–] 14 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    Imagine losing a carrier because a major world power's military IT security is so incompetent they're allowing sailors on active deployment to have unfettered internet access.

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  • [–] 11 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    There was a similar incident where they found a sailor on one US Navy ship had their own Starlink terminal because they were broadcasting an SSID. At the end of the day, you can’t fix stupid.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago

    One of the early successes of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was when they took out a barracks of foreign volunteers because around 40 of them were ex-british soldiers and Russian intelligence linked their phones to historical records collected outside British army bases.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago

    Why does it look exactly like my signature!?

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago*

    It's not like an aircraft carrier is hard to detect anyways. And I doubt you can register Strava activities in a submarine.

    Also also, it's not because there hasn't been a 2nd snowden that there aren't modern Pegasus.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago*
    [–] 7 points 7 months ago (6 children)
  • [–] 12 points 7 months ago* (4 children)

    that's how it looks when you walk/run in circles in a vessel that's moving

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

    I thought the same at first, but comparing to the map scale, I think that would mean the ship is crazy giant (like slightly bigger than the small loops in the track). If you compare that to the islands, it would mean the ship is bigger than many islands.

    Also, it would mean the ship is travelling slower than the man can run, which is possible, but not probable...

    I'm not sure why it's zigzagging, but I would bet it's something else...

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago*

    you can't compare it to the islands, because the GPS trace is in an area within that green circle, with a different scale. You can only look at the 300m scale in the bottom right, which looks in the ballpark of an aircraft carrier to me

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Wow. Can you infer vessel speed by assuming the run always concluded at the start position? The bottom line doesn’t meet back at the top line because the ship and runner were going in opposite directions.

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  • [–] 7 points 7 months ago*

    You don't need that assumption. Your assumption can just be "the person and vessel (or a point in the vessel, like its center of mass) don't diverge significantly over time".

    Then, if you treat velocity as a vector and compute the person's average velocity vector over time, you'll have a pretty close estimation to the vessel's velocity vector.

    After all, if those two average vectors (vessel's and person's) were to differ much, they would end up in different locations.

    The average basically zeroes the vector for each lap the person does, so the remainder must be the vessel's.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    Gotta get those laps in XD

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    iambic heptameter ass route

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