On 9/25, John Reed wrote for Foreign Policy on how the U.S. military is taking steps to protect its nuclear arsenal from cyberattack. The article referenced a 2010 incident where the U.S. Air Force “lost contact with 50 intercontinental ballistic missiles” and “had a temporary interruption in our ability to monitor one of our missile squadrons . . ..” I was previously unaware of this. The article didn’t suggest foul play, but cast the Air Force’s efforts to protect its systems from cyberattack in light of this incident. Interesting.
Anyways, the good thing about our aging ICBM arsenal is that Minuteman’s control system is “[made of] copper wire, and [is] limited in bandwidth,” thereby making that system safe from hacking. However, the article noted that there are still two ways an adversary could get in. One way would be to hack into the missile silo’s radio receivers, “which are designed to read messages from the flying command posts that would be used to launch the missiles in the event that land-based command centers have been destroyed . . ..” The other method would be to hack into the cables connecting the missile silos to the launch control centers.
You can find John Reed’s article for Foreign Policy here.
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