Bluetooth tracker hidden in a postcard and mailed to a warship exposed its location — $5 gadget put a $585 million Dutch ship at risk for 24 hours

Comments

• Shadow@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The science behind this one confuses me. Bluetooth is short range, and gps is too low power to penetrate. There’s no way a gps will get lock from inside a ship, and someone would need a compatible app and internet to relay it out.

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  • Ooops@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    But decades of media has conditioned people to believe that most tech and IT stuff is basically magic, and that seems to nowadays include tech-centric journalists.

    So they simply don’t think about actual feasibility and just report omitting details because “look, tech wizard did tech-magic”.

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  • cecilkorik@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Stories like this always feel like misdirection efforts to deflect blame from the actually responsible devices and organizations. The amount of normalization of openly-broadcasting-at-all-times cellphones in our society can’t really be explained with anything less than an overwhelming multi-level propaganda campaign.

    Who needs spies anymore when you can just convince everyone, even military personnel, to carry around an always-on camera and microphone with onboard power and various long-range wireless options (and get them to willingly keep it continuously charged for you!)

    WTF are we doing to ourselves and why anybody tolerates this nonsense I have no idea.

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    • MNByChoice@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yes!

      An diplomats/CEOs using Teslas!

      • Optical cameras are mandated at Musk’s insistence, despite lidar being better.
      • Built in cell modem for “over the air updates”.
      • Massive processing onboard for “interpreting the cameras”.
      • Microphones and cameras inside to “ensure the driver is paying attention”.
      • Big ass batteries for driving and keeping sky kit running.
      • Get the targets to pay for the spy gear themselves.

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  • Powderhorn@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Thanks for writing this for me. This seems implausible without other failures happening in concert.

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  • pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yep, which terrifies me about apple devices because of its mesh system. All devices bounce from one to the next until one gets internet and it pings the location

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  • Midnitte@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Comment below explains it very well

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• MetalSlugX@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  How does the tracker communicate its position?

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  • colournoun@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    In general:

    • The tracker sends out low-energy Bluetooth announcements including its unique id
    • a nearby iPhone hears those announcements
    • the iPhone uses its current location
    • the iPhone sends the tracker id and the location back to Apple via WiFi or cell
    • Apple notifies the owner of the tracker where the tracker was seen

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• RickRussell_CA@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The thing providing the location of the device is the phone… how are military allowed to carry personal phones?

  I’ve worked in Top Secret facilities and holy shit no you are not allowed to bring phones inside. How is an active duty ship less controlled?

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  • vodka@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    They probably weren’t dark. If they go dark and want to actually not be tracked people do turn off their phones.

    And while I dunno about Dutch ships, from talking to people who have served on Norwegian ships, they do in fact go around with detectors to verify that the ship is actually dark when they go dark and you do get severely punished if you didn’t turn your phone off.

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  • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I am guessing that it’s different because they spend weeks and months on the ship. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t be too keen to enlist in the navy if it required not having my personal phone for months on end. They gotta make some concessions in policy to keep everyone sane.

    Or maybe they’re banned but people sneak them in anyway.

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• Gork@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Article indicates it was one of those electronic popup type birthday card things, not what I would consider a postcard (a 4" x 6" really flat single sheet of card stock) which would be unable to hold any sort of device.

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• orvorn@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I can’t believe any military operation allows the use of unsecured phones by personnel. Always blows my mind.

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  • RandomStranger@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Military personnel are people too. Regular people. And most of the stuff the do is boring and uninteresting to adversaries. Putting too hard restrictions would just lower morale and risk future recruiting.

    So like in any organization you rely on infosec training and hope that it will work. Like in any organization the human factor will cause it to occasionally fail.

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    • orvorn@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      No amount of infosec training will make your civilian iPhone secure. All I’m saying is that it’s weird not to issue secure phones to personnel.

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• supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I propose a solution. Invest in unmanned surface vehicles to carry duplicates of mail and require every piece of mail sent to sailors to have a duplicate of which randomly is selected the actual copy of mail to send to the real navy ship. Collect duplicates of the mail and send it on unmanned surface vehicles to sail around and pretend to be navy ships while gathering surveillance data.

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  • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You’d also need to send along an iPhone and android phone, as well as make sure they have appropriate apps installed (tile for instance) and they never die.

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• timo21@mastodon.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  @remington I didn't notice how this trick was discovered.

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