Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter aircraft can be jailbroken “just like an iPhone,” the Netherlands’ defense secretary has claimed. Gijs Tuinman made the comments during a podcast interview after being asked whether the aircraft’s software could be modified by European forces without permission from the US should it withdraw as an ally.
“The F-35 is truly a shared product,” Tuinman told BNR’s Boekestijn en De Wijk show. “The British make the Rolls-Royce engines, and the Americans simply need them too. And even if this mutual dependency doesn’t result in software updates, the F-35, in its current state, is still a better aircraft than other types of fighters.” “If you still want to upgrade despite everything … you can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone.”
Read more…
Source: The Register News
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- UK MoD says no data leaked to China via drone vulnerability
August 10, 2026
Britain’s Ministry of Defence said on Monday that there is no evidence that military data was compromised after a cyber vulnerability was discovered in Royal Navy drones. The issue was identified during routine cybersecurity testing, the ministry said, adding that it continues to conduct security checks across its equipment and systems. Read more… Source: EUROACTIV Sign up for the ...
- Mirage Kitten targets Middle East and Africa region with new malware
July 28, 2026
Mirage Kitten – also known as UNC1549, Smoke Sandstorm, and Nimbus Manticore – is an advanced persistent threat (APT) group focused on cyber-espionage operations against aerospace, aviation, defense, and telecommunications sectors across the Middle East and Africa, using highly targeted spear-phishing campaigns, fake recruitment portals, and custom multi-stage malware to gain persistent access and exfiltrate sensitive data. During ...
- Hacktivists call out Trump by hacking and defacing US Army websites
July 7, 2026
The U.S. Army has reportedly fixed two of its websites that had been defaced to display pro-Kurdish messages and to call out President Donald Trump, the latest case of hackers compromising systems run by the federal government in recent months. Security researcher Ronald Lovelace told Cyberscoop, which first reported the defacements, that error pages were modified on two U.S. Army ...
- Public and Private Medical Community Targeted by China-Nexus Threat Actor
June 15, 2026
Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has identified a sophisticated campaign attributed to UNC6508, a People’s Republic of China (PRC)-nexus threat actor, targeting institutions in the North American academic, medical, and military research community. While remaining undetected for over a year, the threat actor compromised externally facing web applications, deployed bespoke malware, pivoted to sensitive internal ...
- Future Forces Exhibition & Forum 2026: Where Decisions Are Made
May 22, 2026
Europe’s security landscape has not looked like this in a generation. The war in Ukraine has rewritten the operational playbook across land, air and cyber domains. Autonomous systems, counter-UAS technologies and electronic warfare are no longer future concepts – they are present requirements. Against this backdrop, Prague will once again become a central forum for defence ...
- Chinese engineer stole US military and NASA software for years
April 28, 2026
International espionage isn’t always about sophisticated malware and zero-day bugs. Sometimes it’s as simple as pretending to be someone else asking for a favor. For four years, a Chinese aerospace engineer did just that. Dozens of researchers at NASA, the US military, and major universities handed him exactly what he asked for, and possibly violated US ...