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Computer Virus Aboard the ISS
chrb writes "BBC News is reporting that laptops taken to the International Space Station by NASA astronauts are infected with the Gammima.AG worm. The laptops have no net connection; officials suspect the worm may have been transferred via a USB flash drive owned by an astronaut. NASA have said this isn't the first time computer viruses had travelled into space."
That they need IT staff on the ISS.
Even astronauts are not smart enough to maintain and repair their computers.
Honestly though, Why the hell dont the laptops have anti virus software? if they are going to run a OS that is targeted by the bulk of viruses out there then it's dumb to send it up without AV software installed.
There is no reason for a email/nutritional PC to not run AV.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Microsoft can't hear you scream.
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
And to think that I hated that line. Unfortunately for the life from a meteorite theory, computer viruses are a bit more resiliant to the extremes of space.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Does the Gammima.AG worm run on Linux?
To top it all, NASA says in the same breath that they are investigating how the worm got abort and that the austronauts' laptops don't have any anti-virus software... Go figure!
Now someone do SkyNet...
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Oh God! HERE comes the Computer Andromeda Strain!!
AH!!
What *Windows* is doing in space in the first place.
you had me at #!
that Captain Kirk picked up something nasty from those green bitches. Damn space viruses.
If they're not more careful, we might find someday intelligent artificial life out there... and kill it.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
This is even further proof that NASA(as well as most every other major organization) needs to move away from the virus laden, insecure, corporate blunder we call Microsoft. Sure Exchange is a great mail system but its still just an iteration of a wheel that was created long before it. Were a giant like NASA or Boeing or Lockheed Martin or the US Govt itself to step away from the Microsoft Corporation, we'd start to see whatever the new adoptee was (preferably Linux) take some serious light and hopefully outshine the Gates machine.
Beware the mutations that will, as bad science movies have taught us, inevitably happen. The destruction of all life on Earth is nigh.
That's what the laptop virus is there for - you can't be too careful.
Nobody in NASA should need AV software if they don't touch the internet... except for the fact that viruses hang out on USB sticks now. I've seen at least one myself, and I think it depended on a Windows autorun file similar to what runs CDs for the masses.
Can someone with more experience explain how to avoid USB stick viruses? Are you safe if you have a USB stick that doesn't have any proprietary software, or will the good ole Windows auto-open or autorun screw you regardless?
If an alien computer virus managed to get into and propagate through Earth computers....
Network security really isn't that hard! It isn't like it's rocket scie... oh... nevermind...
I think they took their research on how viruses react in zero gravity just a little too far this time.
How about the minor detail that they are in an isolated environment, (i.e. space) and have no internet connection. Aside from this fluke, what are the odds of catching a computer virus in space? Really? I never install AV on my isolated systems either, not because I'm stupid, but because computer virii don't spring fourth from nowhere.
What happened to Flight Linux?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Slashdot: "The laptops have no net connection"
Article: "The laptops infected with the virus were used to run nutritional programs and let the astronauts periodically send e-mail back to Earth."
Will there be an Andromeda Strain of this Virus?
Regards, Ian
Nice to know there is at least one "window" that kind easily break on the ISS ;)
... (more than why they are not running anti-virus software) is why they are allowed to carry on objects that might accidentally pose a threat to the ISS and/or the important research taking place.
Anti-virus cannot be your only line of defense.
From Symantec's site:
It then attempts to steal sensitive information for the following online games:
* ZhengTu
* Wanmi Shijie or Perfect World
* Dekaron Siwan Mojie
* HuangYi Online
* Rexue Jianghu
* ROHAN
* Seal Online
* Maple Story
* R2 (Reign of Revolution)
* Talesweaver
Oh noes, now how will the astronauts be able to play their Japanese MMO's?
Q. Where do these NASA guys get their pr0n from?
A. Oh yeah.. the USB drive.
RutSum.com
Actually, they just took the virus to space to have it readily available when the aliens attack. Of course they didn't remember to also take a Mac to upload it to the alien base ship, so I guess we're doomed.
I hope they will not get the Blue Screen of death during landing...
They really need to come up with a way to visualize echoing sound in html5.
Come on slashdot, don't be twee, what Operating System does this 'computer virus' need to run on .. Systems Affected: Windows 2000, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP ..
davecb5620@gmail.com
That'll teach them to use Microsoft products in a place where it could me life and death.
Can you just imagine how a pre-biological species based on silicon and power wires enters the space age....
And then some day their computers are infected with a populair biological-virus, made by some siliconcyberpunk, who likes to hack bio-systems.
Perhaps life on earth had digital start. If such viruses leaked out..
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
Somebody got busted surfing for some porn, so they came up with this USB key story. Have you seen the Crazy Bitches they have up there ? I'd bring some porn too.
What was all that shit about NASA astronauts being our best and brightest again?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So, on some computers which (A) have been there for years, and (B) have no network connection over which to download virus signature updates, somehow miraculously that AV software would be up to date and able to recognize the newest trojans. I don't know what AV software that is, but I want it too ;)
Or, I know, let's send Mordac up there with each Shuttle or rocket trip, to install those updates.
Oh yeah, and you so want to be up there on your own, when the retarded AV software after a buggy update decides one or more of the following:
- some critical Windows file looks suspicious and deletes it. It happened more than once IRL.
- some piece of binary data transmitted by or to your computer looks suspiciously like an obscure, outdated SQL-Server exploit, and shuts the program down and cuts off the network connection. I can personally testify that it happened to me in WoW, never mind that it wasn't on the right port, I had no version of SQL-Server installed, and it was on a connection to WoW that was on for 2 hours now and thus unlikely to be what a virus does. Or see the infamous "STARTLOGGER"/"STOPLOGGER" idiocy that made it possible for a while to disconnect anyone from IRC (and God knows what else) if they have Norton AV installed. Yeah, you so want that on a space station's computers.
- introduces a bigger vulnerability of its own than Windows has. At least one RL mass-pwnage, and of the format-your-hdd sort at that, happened over a buffer overflow vulnerability in IIRC McAffee's firewall. Or if you look in the history of Norton's patch notes, a _lot_ of them were patching old buffer overflow vulnerabilities in their AV software.
- suddenly decides that an otherwise legitimate piece of software is too dangerous, and just deletes it. It happened to me with one AV which decided that IRC is too dangerous a place and just removed my mIRC executable. Not because of some malicious code, or even vulnerability, in that version of mIRC, but just because apparently they considered it dangerous anyway. You so want to be up on a space station when such a piece of crap decides that your, say, telnet is too dangerous and must be stopped.
- loads itself in memory twice and slows everything down to a crawl. Happened to me, with an older version of McAffee's AV. Oh, and trying to stop or uninstall it, only stopped one of the copies.
- goes paranoid about protecting the user's "privacy", and prevents legitimate logins. Again, McAffee did that for me. Half the sites were so confused by whatever it did, that they simultaneously thought I'm logged in _and_ not logged in. I was starting to develop a deep empathy for Schroedinger's cat. You surely want that kind of thing randomly happening when you're trying to log into some more important thing up there.
Heh ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I've had it with these mother*&!%$@# worms on this mother*&!%$@# space station! Everybody strap in. I'm about to open some *&!%$@# airlocks.
To destroy any monoliths that try to block Lucifer.
Those bastards.
Clearly it used a wormhole as its attack vector.
I wonder what virus was actually the first to make it to space.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Anyone who has read or watched any science fiction knows that it is only a matter of time before one of these innocent viruses from Earth is bombarded by radiation or infected by some space alien to become a super-virus capable of infecting human nervous systems and turning the infected human into a flesh eating zombie! Its only a matter of time...
Come to think of it, isn't that a pretty good description of the folks who are in Denver this week?
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Well of course it isn't. I suspect that viruses traveled into space on the Sputnik, and any other spacecraft not built in a sterile clean room. I mean, that's kind of obvious!
It was part of a top-secret program to make sure that our computer viruses operated properly on alien spacecraft, just in case most of our cities are blown up on July 4th.
I am officially gone from
The virus is actually an alien computer system attempting to interface with the station's computer systems.
Kirk: Spock __ Can __ you translate __ their message? Spock: Yes Captain. The message is, "Do you wish to enlarge your penis?" Kirk: Make it so...
equals wormhole! Ha! Ha! Ha.. oh never mind.
"The laptops have no net connection .."
..
..
..
.. speculation by a slashdot reader don't count ..
So, how do they send/receive email
"The laptops infected with the virus were used to run nutritional programs and let the astronauts periodically send e-mail back to Earth"
So, they do have a net connection
"The laptops carried by astronauts reportedly do not have any anti-virus software on them to prevent infection"
So how did they detect the 'infection' by the Gammima.AG worm
"The ISS has no direct net connection"
How do the laptops send/recieve email
--
"We are having a hard time understanding the how and why, but everything is working", Commander Bill Sheperd Feb 2001
davecb5620@gmail.com
...to see how computer viruses behave in space.
I'm going to re-watch 2001 and see if Dave has a USB stick in any of the shots. Maybe I'll just photoedit one in....
http://xkcd.com/463/ has a comic that is about voting machines, but might be slightly similar to this situation...
Those who live by the sword, get shot by those who live by the gun...
why are they running Windows on the shuttle? There really is NO reason to do so. Hopefully, it is not used in anyplace that can allow another country to control the ISS (or our space crafts).
The laptops have no net connection
:p
I should hope not!!! Sending a multi billion $ project in to space with no AV and windows could lead to another disaster. Heck using windows alone is too much imagine the control station blue screening on you during re-entry with an "invalid floating point" error
Quick! Somebody arrest Jeff Goldblum! Before the shields go down and the blow the ISS out of the sky!
Computers infect viruses!
MS Exchange can do a wide variety of things but it is certainly not a "great mail system". It scores poorly against any other widely accepted email server software and it wasn't even possible to back up the mail store of a running system reliably until about two version backs. Those Exchange Admins that were too lazy to ever attempt a bare metal recovery from backups will of course insist that it was reliable but the documentation from MS trumps fanboy worship anyday. Check out Excahnge sysadmin mailing lists/forums for it's more recent quirks that can result in lost or misdirected messages - you don't use it if all you want is email.
This can only mean one thing. Radiation from space will mutate them until they are 50 feet tall and they rampage through our cities! Either that, or they will gain superpowers and become evil super-virus-villains bent on world conquest.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I blame Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum.
I blame Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum
Interesting that the point went a mile over your head. Sorry.
The point is that the same could happen with any other application. E.g., you could put the string "STARTLOGGER" in a web page and the retarded AV would then block the browser from accessing the network. You could have a hardware random number generator attached to a PC, and the AV would disconnect you if the sequence of bytes received resembled anything on its flawed signatures.
Also, the issue of deleting Windows DLL's didn't happen in conjunction with either WoW or mIRC, it just nuked Windows. A retarded signature file update made a couple of Windows DLL's look like they have viruses. And that's a big failure. Lesser visible ones included hundreds of cases of some innocent installer, or some third party program, or once even one of my own programs written in C was mistaken for a virus and promptly destroyed.
There is absolutely nothing that's WoW or mIRC only about that mode of failure.
Or in other words, today's free clue is: sometimes an example is just an example, not the whole set. If I say "for example, that dog has rabies", it doesn't mean that _only_ that dog has rabies and no other dog could possibly ever have that.
Again, the point is that the same could happen with any other application.
But apparently they did bring a trojan on an USB stick. And it wasn't the first time.
Regardless, the issues I've described could happen over any data stream, no matter which.
Right, because they so have the manpower to do a clean room reverse-engineering of all viruses, within hours of their release. Not.
Writing AV software doesn't mean just writing the engine. It also means coming up with all those virus signatures. That's the hard part.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
AV Software Definition: A alarm system that alerts you when you are already screwed.
The real question is what else do these laptops have on them, root kits, bots, trojans, keyloggers?
Got Code?
Everyone knows the biggest hurdle to get anything into space is the mass of the object. The additional fuel required to get all those extra 1's and 0's into space just can't justify the benefits of the anti-virus software.
it was like that when I got here.. I wasen't here when that happened... second shift musta done that....
http://www.xkcd.com/463/
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
How about the minor detail that their Windows has autoexec on? Or that it doesn't have noexec as a mount option? Linux does.
Oh great, we'll be considered genocidal invaders by any cybernetic life forms we meet in space as we infect them with crummy Earth based computer viruses that they have no resistance to! We'd better take Norton, Avg, Sophos, et. al. with us on all future space missions. Nasa now begins searching for computer geeks who'll be able to adapt to outer space. That shouldn't be a problem since we're already sedentary and blobish in many cases. I'd go in for legs to be replaced by a second set of arms if assigned to a permanent space based colony or ship. That way one can type of two keyboards at once. Or use the second set of hands for more, ah hem, pleasant activities while working. Imagine the new yoga positions that are possible with four hands... Knew that complete porn collection from hacking the Intertubes routers would come in doubly handy one day! Now, where is that Nasa application...
The future of the geek is solidified in human culture as long as we remain a science and technology based culture. Now if only we could get those whack nut job religious types to stop their silly myths which permit people to kill each other, we might have a chance to live out our geek inspired futures in objective reality. Forward to the future!
That's one small step for a virus, one giant leap for viruskind.
I don't think I'd be willing to take a trip up on a shuttle with any windows install present if it was free.
They should have /all/ of those machines running Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE, *BSD, or OSX.
That cosmic ray flux could be a bad thing up there...
"...there'll be a thousand mutations, Andromeda will spread everywhere, we'll never be rid of it!"
Should be ISO27000 certified in which case how was someone even allowed to plug an unauthorized mass storage device into the laptop in the 1st place? Also why wasn't AV software installed on it?
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
So, on some computers which (A) have been there for years, and (B) have no network connection over which to download virus signature updates, somehow miraculously that AV software would be up to date and able to recognize the newest trojans. I don't know what AV software that is, but I want it too ;)
If those computers are so isolated, so cut off from all other computers, how did the virus get there?
There must have been some connection to some network at some point. How else would the virus get in? Could the same connection be used for AV updates?
That always kills the.. umm wait, different virus... nevermind.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Do we have a real-life sequel to Alien 3 here?
slashdot rocks
I really hope they aren't using a consumer grade OS for ship control systems.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
. . . formatting your c: drive. . .
What?
Murder plots over love triangles (astro-diaper girl), infected computers going mad, sci fi is getting real. Who says Mars missions will be boring? It may not be good for national pride, but it will make space much more interesting to the average joe or joelynn.
Table-ized A.I.
how long can computer viruses survive in space?
maybe this answers the question where they come from.
Har har..
-- Spankmeister General
...the ship's got space herpes.
Then from Symantec's description,
It doesn't appear to be replicating through the network. Or have I misunderstood it?
w00t
Initiating Autonomous Global Diagnostic Scan... ...Scan Complete Anomaly Found.
Matching with known database... Done. 1 Match Found.
Anomaly classified: Gammima.AG worm
Cleansing Procedure Initiated...
Self-Destruct in:
5
4
3
2
1
boom.
I mean seriously it was found on laptops used to monitor nutrition? On Noes!!!111!
"OMG the nutrition laptop is down!? How many carbs am I allowed today! HOW MANY!"
Come on, he's called Mark Shuttleworth and you didn't make a joke? :(
"the ground controls uploads and downloads of files .. Email is move by copying Outlook PST files"
This is interesting, do you have any citations or an actual URL to a NASA site that describes the technical details?
Like hows does clicking 'SEND' translate into downloading a PST file, are the files syncronized, when a new PST file is uploaded does it overwrite the old one, is there a different file for each laptop/user, how is syncronization maintained?
davecb5620@gmail.com
will definitely go to the first bot herder that manages to get a node on the ISS.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
As Linux and FreeBSD in that point today, someone needs to investigate who or which board had the genius idea of putting Windows to Space. It smells really, really dirty.
I like OS X and Apple but if I had something to put on Space, it would be SE Linux ( http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/ ) or Trusted BSD http://www.trustedbsd.org/ and nothing else. It is not like they will play God damn DirectX games there. If scientists require Windows, again, they need to get investigated too. GNU doesn't put millions of hours of free work on Fortran support etc. for nothing. If scientist can't code plain Fortran/Java or C code, he is not a scientist.
This is not a regular, "Oh look how stupid they are" thing. If one digs it enough, there could be some sort of Space-Watergate scandal out of it.
Putting a Windows to space is something like amazing joke. As nobody would joke with billion dollar equipment, it must have some background.
Never mind. It was a lot funnier in my head.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It's not a "computer virus", it's a "Microsoft virus".
"ISS" doesn't use windows at all.. Most if not all of the actual hardware seem to be running on different versions of linux (mind you, quite a bit of the hardware is from around the Y2K or before, so you'll see p233s with 64mb ram running things).
The only things infected were a couple of laptops running "nutritional programs", (whatever the hell those are).. Even then, all ISSEarth communication goes through fairly tough screening, and is not directly linked to the 'net, so it's not as if planting trojans on astronaut's laptops is very useful, or challenging (seeing how the laptops weren't running AV Software, and are far from mission critical equipment).
anyway, see this possibly partial, old entry on what some parts of ISS are run on.
It's HAL. He's shutting down the laptops to prevent mission failure.
That Japanese astronaut's kids got a hold of his laptop for some online game playing before he went up with it into space recently....since the virus is predominately found in online Asian gameplaying sites, according to the article. 2+2=4 so it ain't too hard to finger the culprit in this case. Elementary, in fact.
Sherlock Holmes out.
nt
No company is going to make space probes just for science. NASA is needed for that kind of exploration.
Could you address why companies couldn't build space probes for private charities?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
When it came onboard, it was in fact a nearly harmless variety of the common cold. However,exposure to cosmic rays and near zero gravity conditions have forced it to mutate and gain special powers!
I demand they blow the infected laptops out of the airlock rather than bring them back to earth for study, and perhaps use as biotechnological weapons...
Where are the true geeks?
Didn't the Cylons attack this way?
WhatMeWorry
Why hand over several hundred MB of RAM and a huge chunk of your processor power (which in turn means electricity, which is an limited commodity up there) to a program that slow things down to a crawl in the process of looking for things that shouldn't have a way to get onboard in the first place, and pesters you constantly about not being up-to-date.
Heck, I've run my current Windows computer for the last 18 months without AV software. I finally had a hint that maybe something bad had gotten in (turned out to be an annoying Java bug) and installed AV software. The worst thing it found was a bunch of 3rd party cookies.
Of course, they could have turned off file preview so it wouldn't have executed the worm simply by accessing the flash drive.
I'll volunteer to go fix it...and pack my linux cd's
No wonder NASA stands: Needs Another Sev.... you know the rest.
Winders in space is a bad idea, just like in WAR ...for those of you who know of the practice exercises on the US aircraft carriers... By the time the Winders Server's were rebooted the WAR game was over....
Most Slashdot editors have happily replaced words in my stories.
The "M$ Windoze" prose usually needs to be scrubbed out. Otherwise people would think Slashdot is run by teenagers on Prozac.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
That USB drive had to have been connected to a PC on Earth to get files moved onto it. So the Earthly PC must also have out of date on A/V signatures.
User laziness on file management/Anti-virus in a Windows environment is the issue here.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Wow, Twitter learnt how to spell Windows!
Must rush outside to look for some flying pigs
Make SELinux enforcing again!