Navy nixes cyber attack theory on USS Fitzgerald and McCain collision

The promised investigation into the circumstances of the recent, devastating Navy collisions has turned up zero evidence that cyber attacks disabled either the USS Fitzgerald or USS John S. McCain.

Navy Adm. John Richardson said in an all-hands call streamed live on Facebook Aug. 30 that, despite the Navy giving an "amazing amount of attention" to the postulate that cyber attacks were behind the collisions of the USS Fitzgerald and the USS John S. McCain, the investigation has found no evidence of such claimed attacks.

"We've given that an amazing amount of attention," Richardson said. "It is sort of a reality of our current situation that part of any kind of investigation or inspection is going to have to take a look at the computer, the cyber, the information warfare aspects of our business. We're doing that with these inspections as well, but to date, the inspections that we have done show that there is no evidence of any kind of cyber intrusion."

"We'll continue to look deeper and deeper but I just want to assure you that, to date, there's been nothing that we've found to point to that," Richardson said.

Richardson said in a tweet Aug. 21 that there may have been indications of cyber intrusion, but said the Navy would continue looking into that possibility. With his recent all-hands call, Richardson has all but foreclosed completely the potential for a discovery of a cyber intrusion involved in the collisions of the Navy vessels.

2 clarify Re: possibility of cyber intrusion or sabotage, no indications right now...but review will consider all possibilities

— Adm. John Richardson (@CNORichardson) August 21, 2017

The statement effectively puts to rest the enormous amount of speculation in security circles about whether cyber attacks were in any way involved in disrupting the navigational systems of these two Navy vessels, but even in the beginning other experts suspected that negligence was a far more likely explanation.

"The balance of the evidence still leads me to believe that it was crew negligence as the most likely explanation — and I hate to say that because I hate to think that the Navy fleet was negligent," University of Texas at Austin aerospace professor Todd Humphreys told USA Today.