New US weapons systems being developed by the US Department of Defence can be easily be hacked by adversaries, a new government report said on Tuesday. The Government Accountability Office said the Pentagon was unaware of how easy it could be for an adversary to gain access to the computer brains and software of the weapons systems and operate inside them undetected.

The weak points began with poor password management and unencrypted communications, it said. But it said access points for the systems continued to grow in number and are not always well-understood by the operators themselves, leaving even non-networked systems deeply vulnerable. More critically, the report faulted the US military for not incorporating cybersecurity into the design and acquisition process for the computer-dependent weapons, and said weapons developers often did not themselves adequately understand cybersecurity issues.