About The IT Outage

You've by now probably heard of the global IT outage involving Microsoft and CrowdStrike. Here are some things they neglected to include in the narrative.

Forty years ago, I was the chief engineer of an SSBN (nuclear powered ballistic missile submarine). I'm certain much has changed since then, but the basics remain the same.

One of the basics is that authorized weapon launch orders have to be securely and reliably sent and received, while bogus orders MUST be prevented. I have no idea how that is done these days, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Over the past several years I have seen reports in the MSM concerning the fact Microsoft software is used on our nuclear subs. Perhaps it's used in the weapon control and communication systems. I have no specific knowledge of that, but it's certainly a possibility.

Now ... if it's so easy for a simple "error" like the one which just occurred to take down Windows 10 systems globally, who's to say that an ACTUAL attack couldn't do the same thing, or worse? And who's to say that any impacts on our military of the recent outage haven't already filtered back to our enemies?

As for CrowdStrike, I have no specific knowledge whether they're telling us the truth about this event, but their response to the DNC server "hack" makes me wonder. They claimed it was a hack, and the FBI apparently took their word for it. Bill Binney and several other IT professionals, on the other hand, said it was NOT a hack and suspected the information was transferred via a thumb drive directly connected to the server. Was this difference of opinion ever resolved?

We may never know exactly what caused the recent IT outage. But let's all hope and pray that whoever is responsible for this mess and the people who have oversight responsibilities find the root causes and fix them.

Nuclear weapons and the systems associated with them require the utmost care. Any carelessness CANNOT be tolerated.