Slashdot Mirror
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."
Microsoft can't hear you scream.
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
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.
Wow, someone who actually believes AV software stops viruses effectively?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
You don't really understand. There is nothing they could have done to prevent the worm. The astronaut was installing Outlook which asked them to "close all software like antivirus and firewall which may interfere with the installation". The rest is history...
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.
Network security really isn't that hard! It isn't like it's rocket scie... oh... nevermind...
Alas, while AV doesn't stop everything it is a lot better than not having it at all. A good AV scanner probably could have prevented this. Which again is why they should be giving them that little bit of training if they aren't already.
Antivirus software is typically only effective if regularly updated. In machines that aren't networked, getting these updates is very tricky.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Will there be an Andromeda Strain of this Virus?
Regards, Ian
So much for extrans.
I _FAIL_
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Because Minix doesn't support text formatting.
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?
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.
It looks like Mark Shuttleworth might have to make another trip up there to drop off some Ubuntu disks.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Q. Where do these NASA guys get their pr0n from?
A. Oh yeah.. the USB drive.
RutSum.com
If they're not more careful, we might find someday intelligent artificial life out there... and kill it.
Yes, because intelligent artificial lifeforms will definitely be running windows Vista on an x86 architecture.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
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.
How about the minor detail that the Austronauts can bring USB sticks with them that have not been thoroughly checked for malware. While being an isolated environment it obviously isn't protected from security challenged austronauts.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
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...
"The laptops have no net connection .."
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.. 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
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.
EVEN clamav?
Man, clamav is better than most.
NO SIG
The reason NASA didn't bother with AV is because there's no pressure on their IT department. In a normal office, the IT department usually gets screamed at when computers don't work. But in space, nobody can hear you scream.
I hate printers.
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.
Soviet-style public schools. That's great.
Even your radical freestateproject.org link wants the government to protect our rights. I presume this is done via a police and/or court system.
If our rights are so great, why is it that the only way you can get funding is to threaten to throw my ass in jail if I don't feel like paying for it?!?!
First, I have to interject here: are you planning to go into a barter system? Or are you hoping that everybody in free association will select a common medium of exchange?
The fact is that capitalism selects for profitability (obviously), and profitability is not necessarily the same thing as greatness. It's an optimization heuristic. It is not a truly optimal algorithm. NASA, and public schools, are attempts to tweak our heuristics to be more optimal. Sometimes our tweaks fail. That does not mean that all tweaks are inherently doomed to fail. Nor does it mean that we should abandon the basic heuristic of capitalism.
If, philosophically, you have a problem with tax-funded anything, then that's okay and you can explain that problem. But to claim that a tax-funded thing is bad because the market is necessarily better, you must first show that the market creates truly optimal conditions at all times in all places.