Nearly every US weapons program tested in 2014 showed "significant vulnerabilities" to cyber attacks, including misconfigured, unpatched and outdated software, the Pentagon's chief weapons tester said in his annual report.
Michael Gilmore, Director of the US Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), said program managers had worked to resolve problems discovered in previous years and security was improving, but this year's testing had revealed new vulnerabilities, Reuters reported
"Cyber adversaries have become as serious a threat to US military forces as the air, land, sea and undersea threats represented in operational testing for decades," Gilmore wrote in the 366-page report.
"The continued development of advanced cyber intrusion techniques makes it likely that determined cyber adversaries can acquire a foothold in most (Department of Defense) networks, and could be in a position to degrade important DOD missions when and if they chose to," he wrote.
The report said tests of more than 40 weapons revealed problems with cybersecurity, and US troops needed to learn to "fight through" cyber attacks, just as they do now with conventional attacks.