Does the Starlink router not allow a hidden SSID? I’d imagine the EW equipment might still notice but it reads like every seaman’s phone was finding it.
Hidden SSIDs are a hack on the wifi protocol and don’t really do anything. Windows 11 just shows ‘Hidden Network’ for example.
They're even worse than useless, because the devices paired to those hidden SSIDs have to probe for them explicitly. So instead of having the base station broadcast its SSID in one spot, you instead have clients broadcasting that SSID everywhere they go, disclosing not only the SSID itself but also their association to it. I wish OSes would go a step further and deanonymize hidden SSIDs, just to drive home to everyone that this feature sucks and doesn't work.
No idea if it works, but it has been around a long time.
I would hope that our warships have sophisticated enough counter signals intelligence systems to detect the presence of rogue transmitters regardless of if they are broadcasting an SSID or not. Even a run of the mill corporate security setup will pick up rogue wifi networks on premises and pinpoint their location.
Agreed. While other commenters say that this can't be stopped, humans need their wifi, etc., I sincerely hope naval intelligence caught this nearly immediately and determined it wasn't an operational hazard, or even better that their new relationship with starlink gave them "enterprise visibility" into this unauthorized civilian link that just happened to be following the path of one of their ships and allowed them to do packet sniffing, etc. and then left it to the normal system to sort it out.