THE collision of a second US warship this year points to the possibility of cyber espionage, an expert has warned. 
 
 The US Navy ordered an investigation Monday into its entire 7th Fleet, based in the Pacific, after the USS John S McCain was involved in a run-in with an oil tanker near Singapore. 
 
 The incident left a gaping hole in the destroyer’s hull, injured five sailors and left 10 sailors still missing. 
 
 It was the second major collision in the last two months involving the 7th Fleet. Seven sailors died in June when the USS Fitzgerald and a container ship collided in waters off Japan. 
 
 US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis announced a pause in operations of the fleet so officials can take a deeper look at its performance, including personnel, navigation capabilities, maintenance, equipment, surface warfare training, munitions, certifications and how sailors move through their careers. 
 
 Navy Admiral John Richardson later clarified in a Twitter post that the review would include the possibility of cyber intrusion or sabotage, although there were “no indications right now”. 
 
 “But review will consider all possibilities,” he said. 
 
 Speculation has been building that the USS McCain was hacked ever since news broke about the collision. 
 
 Itay Glick, founder of cyber security firm Votiro said he had immediately become interested in the potential for cyber interference when he heard about the accident yesterday. 
 
 “I don’t believe in coincidence,” Mr Glick told news.com.au. 
 
 “Both USS McCain and USS Fitzgerald were part of the 7th Fleet, there is a relationship between these two events and there may be a connection.” 
 
 Mr Glick worked in the cyber-warfare unit of the Israeli intelligence agency for seven years and he believes countries like Russia and China may have the capability to launch an attack on the warships. 
 
 “China has capabilities, maybe they are trying things, it is possible,” he said. 
 
 He believes there are two main ways the warship could have been interfered with, including an attack on its GPS that impacted its navigation, or a malware attack on its computer network that gave it incorrect information which may stopped it from seeing the tanker. 
 
 Some have dismissed the idea the warship could have been subjected to a GPS spoof as unlikely, because the signal would have to be wide enough to affect dozens, if not hundreds of ships in the region. 
 
 But Mr Glick said there had already been evidence of this type of technology being used to set at least 20 ships off track in the Black Sea near Russia, and experts have speculated there is potential for it to be isolated to just one target. 
 
 “There is already a lot of interest in cyber protection of cars and autonomous vehicles, we can deduce from that, there might be a way to control ships and airplanes,” Mr Glick said. 
 
 “Whenever control of the vessel is done by computer, or navigation is done by computer, there is a big risk for a cyber attack on that computer.” 
 
 While investigation of the USS Fitzgerald’s collision in June has not been completed, it has already pointed to some human error. The captain has since been relieved of his command and other sailors were punished after the Navy found poor seamanship and flaws in keeping watch contributed to the collision. 
 
 But Mr Glick said unless the warships were at a high readiness level, they were probably relying more on the computer for navigation than on human eyes. 
 
 “Blaming a human is often easier than considering the possibility of a cyber attack,” he said. 
 
 He believes the latest collision strengthens the case for the possibility of cyber espionage. 
 
 “There might definitely be, because it’s not the first incidence.” 
 
 The USS McCain had been heading to Singapore on a routine port visit after conducting a sensitive freedom-of-navigation operation last week by sailing near one of China’s man-made islands in the South China Sea. 
 
 The accident happened at the start of a designated sea lane for ships sailing into the Singapore Strait, one of the world’s busiest. 
 
 Admiral Richardson, the chief of naval operations, said the comprehensive review of the 7th Fleet would look at operational tempo and trends in personnel, matériel, maintenance and equipment. 
 
 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 
 
 Adm. Richardson wants to ensure there aren’t bigger problems in the fleet that may be masked by the high pace of operations and budget uncertainties, according to a Navy official. 
 
 He has directed Admiral Phil Davidson, head of the Navy’s Fleet Forces, to lead the investigation. 
 
 “This review will be on a very tight timetable,” Richardson said. 
 
 “I want to get frequent updates. This requires urgent action and we need to get to it and take corrective action.” 
 
 — With AP 
 
 charis.chang@news.com.au | @charischang2 ||||| The destroyer USS John McCain has arrived at Changi Naval Base in Singapore after a collision with a civilian oil tanker. Pictures show a large, gaping gash in the warship's port side, which caused extensive flooding. Ten sailors remain missing and five were medically evacuated in the second collision in two months involving a U.S. Navy destroyer and a civilian tanker,. 
 
 And where there's a pattern—there's a conspiracy. 
 
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 The McCain collided with the Liberia-registered Alnic MC, a 600 foot long, 30,000 gross ton tanker, in the early morning hours of August 21st, resulting in a large gash on the destroyer's port (left) side. The hole flooded the ship's interior, including crew berthing, machinery, and communications rooms. Damage control teams on the ship reportedly prevented further flooding. Navy divers are on scene at Changi and further assessing damage. 
 
 Closer view of the damage. Note eight Harpoon missile launchers on deck. Getty Roslan Rahman 
 
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 The Strait of Malacca waterway is one of the busiest waterways in the world, with 80,980 transits by ships of all kinds , military and civilian, in 2015. The strait enables ships plying the route between Europe and Asia to shave three days and 1,000 miles off their trip, and traffic has exploded with the growth of China's economy. 
 
 The USS John McCain is an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer. Based at Yokosuka, Japan, it is part of the U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet and one of several destroyers modified to shoot down ballistic missiles. The destroyer was returning from a freedom of navigation exercise in the South China Sea, during which it sailed within six nautical miles of Mischief Reef, an artificial island created and claimed by China. 
 
 Singaporean Navy frigate RSS Intrepid escorts USS McCain into Changi Naval Base. Getty Roslan Rahman 
 
 Already, conspiracies are beginning to make the rounds that the USS McCain—and the USS Fitzgerald earlier this summer—were the victims of GPS sabotage. The theory goes that some unfriendly power interfered with the U.S.-owned, satellite-based Global Positioning System. Military and commercial ships worldwide utilize GPS to determine their locations in relation to other ships. So-called "GPS spoofing" causes GPS trackers to misidentify a ship's location, presumably confusing ships and causing accidents. 
 
 GPS sabotage does exist. America's potential adversaries, realizing the U.S. military's dependence on the system for everything from daily navigation to weapons targeting, have been working to devise ways to jam or spoof GPS signals. 
 
 North Korea periodically jams GPS signals in South Korea , interfering with ship and aircraft navigation, while drivers in Moscow have reported GPS problems in the central part of the Russian capital. Even more ominously, in a case of actual "spoofing," last month sailors in the Black Sea reported that their GPS-based systems were misreporting the location of their ships 25 nautical miles from their actual location. The spoofing was reported off the coast of Novorossiysk, Russia. 
 
 Could the McCain's collision be the result of GPS spoofing? It's very unlikely. Assuming a hostile power wanted to spoof the American destroyer, the signal it would have to broadcast to cause an accident would be wide enough to affect dozens, if not hundreds of ships in the region and someone would have noticed it. (After all, it was ordinary civilian mariners on the Black Sea that reported the spoofing campaign off Novorossiysk.) 
 
 There are enough nearby islands that a meaningful deviation from what ships crews were seeing with their own eyes would have been glaringly obvious. Furthermore, the conspiracy ignores the fact that GPS is not the only means U.S. Navy ships use for navigation. Watchstanders on the McCain should have been posted to keep an eye out for unexpected obstacles, ships not broadcasting an AIS transponder signal, and other potential hazards. ||||| A top U.S. Navy admiral on Monday called for a swift and thorough investigation into Monday's collision of the USS John S. McCain into an oil tanker near Singapore-- marking the second deadly mishap that occurred in the Pacific in the past three months. 
 
 Adm. John Richardson ordered an operational pause in all the fleets around the world while the Navy works to determine the factors behind the collision. Richardson tweeted that the Navy will conduct a wide investigation, including a review into the possibility of "cyber intrusion or sabotage." 
 
 Adm. Phil Davidson, the head of the Navy's Fleet Forces, will lead the investigation. 
 
 Richardson made clear that there is no evidence of a hacking at this point, but some cyber experts have raised to possiblity given the location of the warships. 
 
 Jeff Stutzman, an ex-information warfare specialist in the Navy who works at a cyber threat intelligence company, told McClatchy that “there’s something more than just human error going on." 
 
 "When you are going through the Strait of Malacca, you can't tell me that a Navy destroyer doesn't have a full navigation team going with full lookouts on every wing and extra people on radar," he said. 
 
 Richardson called for a review of the 7th Fleet’s maintenance, personnel and equipment in the region. He called on a new focus on surface warfare training, which includes tactical and navigational proficiency. 
 
 The USS John S. McCain suffered “significant damage” to its hull after a collision with an oil tanker on Monday near Singapore. 
 
 The 7th Fleet said in a statement that damage to the guided missile destroyer's hull flooded nearby compartments including crew berths, machinery and communications rooms. 
 
 Ten sailors are missing and four were hospitalized in Singapore with injuries after being evacuated by helicopter. A multinational search and rescue effort involving Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the U.S. is underway. 
 
 On June 17, the USS Fitzgerald was badly damaged in the collision off the coast of Japan. The waters off Japan are considered congested and considered to be challenging to navigate. 
 
 The seas were relatively calm, and visibility was unrestricted. The bow of the container ship, the Philippine-flagged ACX Crystal, slammed into the Fitzgerald's right side above the waterline, quickly flooding several areas inside the ship, including a berthing, or sleeping, area. 
 
 Seven sailors drowned. 
 
 The New York Times reported that there were radar officers working on the bridge and combat information center below and “should have spotted the freighter’s image on their screens.” One sailor wrote the paper: “All I can say is, somebody wasn’t paying attention.” 
 
 The top three leaders aboard the USS Fitzgerald were removed from duty. 
 
 Aside from the USS McCain and USS Fitgerald incidents, the Navy cruiser USS Antietam ran aground dumping more than 1,000 gallons of oil in Tokyo Bay in February. In May, another cruiser, USS Lake Champlain, hit a South Korean fishing vessel. 
 
 Itay Glick, the founder of a cyber security firm called Votiro, told News.com.au that his initial reaction to news of the USS McCain collision was that it may have been hacked. Glick worked in the cyber-warfare unit of the Israeli intelligence agency and pointed to the possibility of involvement from Russia and China. 
 
 “I don’t believe in coincidence,” Glick said. “Both USS McCain and USS Fitzgerald were part of the 7th Fleet, there is a relationship between these two events and there may be a connection.” 
 
 The Associated Press contributed to this report 
 
 Edmund DeMarche is a news editor for FoxNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @EDeMarche. ||||| U.S. Navy Investigating if Destroyer Crash Was Caused by Cyberattack 
 
 The military is examining whether compromised computer systems were responsible for one of two U.S. Navy destroyer collisions with merchant vessels that occurred in recent months, Vice Adm. Jan Tighe, the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, said on Thursday. 
 
 Naval investigators are scrambling to determine the causes of the mishaps, including whether hackers infiltrated the computer systems of the USS John S. McCain ahead of the collision on Aug. 21, Tighe said during an appearance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. 
 
 Investigators are not, however, considering the possibility that the USS Fitzgerald collision, which took place on June 17, was the result of hacking. 
 
 “With the McCain incident happening so close to the Fitzgerald,” questions immediately arose about whether computer manipulation could have been the cause of the crash, Tighe said. The Navy has no indication that a cyberattack was behind either of the incidents, but it is dispatching investigators to the McCain to put those questions to rest, she said. 
 
 Tighe said the Navy plans to use the results of the McCain probe to look at cybersecurity in future investigations. 
 
 The two collisions left a total of 17 sailors dead and the Navy humiliated. Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson ordered a temporary halt to operations after the second collision and called on the service to review safety protocols for its global fleet. 
 
 While the idea of a cyberattack causing a collision remains purely speculative, U.S. intelligence officials have warned in recent years that this sort of digital threat could pose a major problem for the Navy’s sprawling armada. Tighe said on Thursday that the service has already set aside $1.5 billion between fiscal years 2014 and 2023 to improve defenses. 
 
 The Fitzgerald and the McCain, both Arleigh Burke-class destroyers outfitted with a suite of advanced sensors and weapons, represent two of the most capable ships in the Navy’s arsenal. The collisions have raised troubling questions about the readiness of the American Pacific fleet at a time when it faces a number of threats in the region, from North Korean missile tests to China’s territorial claims over disputed islands. 
 
 Early assessments of the two incidents have blamed both crew training and the growing demands of the Navy’s fleet of warships. Following the McCain collision in August, the Navy relieved the commander of the 7th Fleet, Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin, citing a “loss of confidence in his ability to command.” The skipper of the Fitzgerald has also been dismissed, along with several of the ship’s officers, for losing “situational awareness” ahead of the June collision. 
 
 If hackers breached the McCain’s digital defenses, it would represent a startling development in naval warfare. American intelligence officials have theorized that hackers working on behalf of an enemy state could conceivably hack into a ship’s computer systems and blind its commander by, for example, displaying an inaccurate location of the ship on its charts. 
 
 Such a deception could conceivably result in a nighttime crash, such as the McCain‘s. The merchant vessel Alnic MC struck the ship’s left, or port, side and left a huge gash in its hull. 
 
 Tighe said the Navy is preparing for potential digital warfare and said the service has to “be able to fight through” a cyberattack. Ships must monitor their own computer systems, she said, and if one method of communication is knocked out, naval forces have to be able to rely on other methods to relay commands and information. 
 
 “Semaphores” — a system of communicating using hand-held flags — “are going to be really hard to hack,” Tighe said. 
 
 “That’s a joke,” she quickly added. 
 
 Photo credit: ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP/Getty Images
– As the Navy tries to figure out what caused its latest collision, two of the most common theories involve human error or some kind of electrical glitch in the navigation system. But another idea has surfaced as well, and the Navy isn't ruling it out: hacking. "2 clarify Re: possibility of cyber intrusion or sabotage, no indications right now...but review will consider all possibilities," tweeted Adm. John Richardson, chief of naval operations, per Fox News. The idea is that some foreign power, perhaps China or Russia, interfered with the USS John S McCain's GPS navigation, and perhaps did the same before the deadly June collision involving the USS Fitzgerald. Here's a look at what experts are saying: 'Very unlikely': At Popular Mechanics, Kyle Mizokami tosses cold water on the idea that "GPS spoofing" is to blame. For one thing, broadcasting such an interference signal would likely have affected dozens of ships in the area, not just the USS McCain, and there's no indication of that. Plus, Navy ships don't rely solely on GPS: Human spotters should have seen the hazard. It's fishy: "There’s something more than just human error going on," a former information warfare specialist for the Navy tells McClatchy, referring to the string of Navy accidents. The story notes that on June 22, hackers appear to have manipulated the GPS signals of 20 ships in the Black Sea, the first such instance of GPS misdirection, or spoofing. The ships' GPSes actually told them they were on land, and the best guess is that the interference came from Russia. It's fishy, take II: "I don’t believe in coincidence," a former member of Israel's cyber-warfare unit tells news.com.au. In addition to interfering with GPS signals, hackers also could have planted malware in the ships' computer network, he says. "China has capabilities, maybe they are trying things, it is possible." The USS McCain had been returning from a patrol in the South China Sea, where it sailed by one of China's contested man-made islands, when the collision occurred. Remains of some of the 10 missing sailors from the USS McCain have been found on the ship itself.