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US Drone Fleet Hit By Computer Virus
New submitter Golgafrinchan passes along this quote from an article at Wired:
"A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America's Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots' every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones. The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military's Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech's computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military's most important weapons system.'"
Don't run windoze on bombs!
Or aircraft carriers!
Will we never learn??
Ok, so I understand that these computers are to never be connected to the internet, but why does that mean that they don't put security software on them?
Yes, they would have to do updates manually, and it's a low risk situation, but it is a prime target for foreign adversaries and allies alike.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”
If someone this incompetent was running a corporate network they'd have their ass on the street faster than they could say "network traffic analysis."
When they say the drones were infected, what they mean is that the computers controlling the drones (located in the US and which are, apparently, running Windows...) were infected with a keylogger, probably spread through flash drives. Whether this actually compromises security at all is unknown (keyloggers generally assume you are connected to the Internet, which these computers aren't.) They don't have much security on the drone computers because they aren't hooked up to the Internet, and they would (apparently) rather educate their users than bother with antivirus, for whatever reason (although they do have a security system on the network which detected the virus. I would imagine it also should have stopped the virus).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
The big problem is that the drones keep ordering refueling boom enlargement kits, and four of them tried to fly to Nigeria to collect on a half-million gallons of jet fuel that was left there by a former Minister of Aviation.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
No, I sincerely doubt this is some mysterious computer intelligence taking over our military.
BUT... this is clearly the path to skynet. What we are seeing is what pretty much all of us already understood: when you have increasingly autonomous killbots, disaster becomes a question of "when" not "if."
This isn't exactly a new attack vector. Banks don't let people plug removable drives into sensitive systems - why does the US government?
You know what happened - either Joe private plugged his private pr0n collection into a classified computer, or else he took a classified drive home to use privately. Either was, really bad news.
If you've just got to have removable storage, then you pay for special connectors, so they are incompatible with anything else. Then you cast the guts in epoxy, so no solder jockey can change out the connector. This is not rocket science.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
They are not hacking the control software, all they are doing is receiving an unencrypted video feed.
You do not get anywhere close to being able to hack a drone just because you receive something similar to a TV station. You wouldn't be able to hack a TV station though a TV signal and you can't hack a drone though it's video feed.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
box of Kleenex $4
USB key $5
Satellite military uplink $150/hr
Hellfire missile $68,000
Predator MQ-1 Drone, $40 million
Being able to rain firey death from 10,000km away onto unsuspecting Afghan targets while a the same time masturbating on the internet: priceless
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'm not sure it matters who it is. What matters is that if you can intercept a keystroke, you can inject one, and that if you log sequences you know command sequences. That knowledge never needs to go anywhere outside the virus - if the virus catalogs how to do X, Y and Z then an unauthorized user merely needs to tell the virus that it is to replay the sequence to do X, Y or Z. The user doesn't need to know anything other than what macro does what.
For most nations, it just doesn't make sense to do this with any current mission - that we know of, at least. Scripting a drone attack only makes sense if the drone has attacked a point that the person who wrote the virus will want to attack in the future. This is great if you're a nation defending against an attacker overrunning your positions, since you can get the attacker's weapons to attack the attacker. But no current target nation has the capacity for such a strategy and even if they did it would be pointless. It wouldn't be useful at all in Libya, for example, and the draw-down in Afghanistan means the probability of there ever being a meaningful target is next to zero.
Israel is a remote possibility - they've the knowledge - and there are doubtless drone surveillance missions that the Israelies could turn into attacks and keep plausible denial. However, it's exceedingly remote. Most of their threats don't distinguish between the US and Israel, so plausible denial is pointless, and they've enough support to be able to obtain all the US-made drones they want. There's no obvious added value.
The Mexican drug cartels are hampered by drones, but not usually by the high-end military ones, and being able to launch a replay would be absolutely pointless. If they were to have the kind of savvy needed, it would more likely go into a logic bomb that would cripple the drone. It's just possible they'd want to divert a drone to some site of theirs so that they could use it for their own purposes, but you'd not want a logger for that. Makes no sense. Besides which, if they had that kind of skill, they wouldn't need cheap cop drones.
China? Maybe, but again if they wanted a Predator they'd be better off with a logic bomb that disabled the radios and landed the UAV somewhere they could pick it up from. They wouldn't use loggers because there'd be nothing worth logging.
This isn't making sense. The story so far is too illogical. Those with the skills would be doing something different, those who want to do what is claimed don't have the skills.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)