Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
The Royal Navy bought 20 K3 Scouts under a program called Project Beehive, which is apparently not an Austin Powers reference. Each spy boat is 28 feet long, has 650 nautical miles of range, can carry 600 kilograms of payload, and can spend up to thirty days at sea with nobody aboard. They were built to watch the coastline for the British Navy.
Small, powerful, and just a little bit Chinese. (Rheinmetall)
It turns out, however, that the cameras bolted to these boats have been sending what the industry calls a ‘heartbeat’ to an IP address in China. A heartbeat is a small automated signal a device sends to a server to confirm it is switched on and working normally. Unfortunately, this meant these covert British military assets were checking in with Beijing at regular intervals since entering service in March.
The MoD’s public statement is a masterpiece of brightsideism, if that’s a thing. “A thorough investigation found no evidence of MoD data or systems being accessed, compromised or transmitted externally.” Except for, you know, the fact that they were deployed at all. Kraken Technology Group, the Fareham firm that builds the boats, said that after a full audit with the Royal Navy it is confident no sensitive information has ever been shared outside intended channels, and separately explained that the cameras were third-party NDAA-compliant units containing “a small number of components originating from outside the UK.” Outside the UK, as in, from China. Incidentally, Kraken also holds a $49 million contract with US Special Operations Command for the same platform.
The affected system is reportedly a Night Navigator 3000 series camera. The worry is that a camera with an unexplained relationship to a foreign computer server might be photographing the faces of men whose entire professional value depends on nobody having photos of their faces. Defence sources add that some cameras appeared to stay awake while the vessels themselves were powered down, but surely that doesn’t mean anything.
