The U.S. Army's New Up-Gunned Stryker Armored Vehicles Have Been Hacked

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/26458/the-u-s-armys-new-up-gunned-stryker-armored-vehicles-have-been-hacked

By Joseph Trevithick
The Warzone
February 11, 2019

It's been more than a year since the first up-gunned Stryker Dragoon armored 
vehicles arrived in Europe, giving elements of the U.S. Army's forward-deployed 
2nd Cavalry Regiment a much-needed boost in firepower against potential 
threats. Since then, unfortunately, unspecified "adversaries" - a term the U.S. 
military has used in the past to describe the Russians, but that could also 
mean surrogate opponents during an exercise - have also been able to disrupt 
certain systems on the vehicles with a cyber attack on at least one occasion.

The Pentagon's Office of the Director of Test and Evaluation, or DOT&E, 
revealed the existence of the Stryker Dragoon's cyber vulnerabilities in its 
most recent annual report on the status of the vehicle's ongoing development 
during the 2018 Fiscal Year. The initial batch of these vehicles, also known as 
the XM1296 or the Infantry Carrier Vehicle-Dragoon (ICV-D), touched down in 
Germany in December 2017. The Army had begun developing the new variant, which 
features a new turret with a 30mm automatic cannon, directly in response to a 
request from the 2nd Cavalry Regiment in 2015.

"Adversaries demonstrated the ability to degrade select capabilities of the 
ICV-D when operating in a contested cyber environment," DOT&E's report, which 
the office released in January 2019, said. "In most cases, the exploited 
vulnerabilities pre-date the integration of the lethality upgrades."

The report does not say where the cyber attack or attacks occurred or what 
specific systems they impacted. It seems most likely that the attacks had an 
effect on the vehicle's data-sharing, navigation, or digital communications 
capabilities. Disrupting any of these systems, or adding false or confusing 
information into the networks, can hamper or slow U.S. operations or create 
added risks for American forces. Army combat vehicles have onboard GPS 
navigation systems, as well as a GPS-enabled data-sharing system known as Blue 
Force Tracker that provides various information, including their relative 
position to friendly and possible hostile forces, which can help prevent 
friendly fire incidents.

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