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Predator Drone 'Virus' Could Be Military's Own Monitoring
jjp9999 writes "The virus that hit Predator and Reaper UAVs could be an internal monitoring system employed by the military. According to security researcher Miles Fidelman, there are vendors that sell security monitoring packages to the Defense Department which are 'essentially rootkits that do, among other things, key logging.' The virus is a keylogger that was found at pilot stations, and could be keeping tabs on keystrokes used by pilots to control the UAVs, found Wired's Danger Room blog. Fidelman adds, 'I kind of wonder if the virus that folks are fighting is something that some other part of DoD deployed intentionally.'"
The drones are the guilt-free killing machines that the USA needed!!
Sounds like a lame excuse for incompetence to me.
keep thinking about the "key logging" aspect of the story. Are we sure this is a virus? Macro making software, programming key sequencies, must use some kind of keylogging as a matter of course. I didn't look at either article, but I've experienced the humor and grating annoyance of low level tech guys watching task manager or staring at logs and jumping up and going nuts "dja see that?!! VIRUS!!" and spending hours upon hours investigating... the macro making software they installed earlier.
Or perhaps all this talk of viruses in drone systems is laying the ground work to create plausible deniability for hitting the "wrong" target, which in reality, may really be the intended target - think assassinations ... government could claim it wasn't us who killed "X", we would never do that, it must have been those pesky hackers; the virus did it.
Digital warfare style.
"Didn't you get the memo?"
must be a sony drone. oooh burrrn on sony!
-- Flame me and I will happily flame you back. Bring it!
looks like some watchers are watching some the other watchers
Sorry, can't do that. It is classified.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
That is soo lame :) I just recalled a movie Spies Like Us (1985).
Someone needs to be fired. And someone needs fix this shit PRONTO.
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
No no it's not a virus. Its... unannounced monitoring services. Double plus good.
The "researcher" gives the military an easy way to "explain" the discovered breach that doesn't make military look incompetent.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The centrifuges were designed to act that way.
'I kind of wonder if the virus that folks are fighting is something that some other part of DoD deployed unintentionally.'
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
we intended to start another one.
It's not really funny, that regarding this virus it seriously could be both.
"Oh, Never Mind"
The engineering platform I am currently (and reluctantly) using uses systems supplied by corporate IT. As a result we get hit with software updates and tools of dubious benefit with interfere with our application when we run it. Engineering nodes (and particularly operational nodes) should always be managed differently from the administrators laptops, etc.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Thank you. And great quality. I will return to your content again.
I'm not sure if these are military or if they are run by an agency with a long list of failures that alternates between playing at James Bond and playing at Soldiers.
Q: How do we know the CIA didn't shoot Kennedy?
A: Because he's dead.
Luckily, there's a simple test for that. Does the virus bring up the following dialog box?
[Virus Message]
This is not a drill.
[OK] [Cancel]
If so, then it's definitely a DoD virus.
He's a security researcher and so are the Beagle boys. The guy is a well known crank with a rich fantasy life. Slashdot just keeps getting worse.
The whole story can be summarized with the following quote:
Miles Fidelman: "I kind of wonder if..."
That's about it. Let's have some more fun.
Predator Drone 'Virus' Could Have Been Planted By Dick Cheney.
Predator Drone 'Virus' Could Be Product of Iran Intelligence Agency.
Predator Drone 'Virus' Could Be Designed to Target Nude Beaches.
etc.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_Found_in_a_Bathtub
Quote: "Set in the distant future, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is the horrifying first-hand account of a bureaucratic agent trapped deep within the subterranean bowels of a vast underground military complex. In a Kafkaesque maelstrom of terrifying confusion and utter insanity, this man must attempt to follow his mission directives of conducting an "on-the-spot investigation. Verify. Search. Destroy. Incite. Inform. Over and out. On the nth day nth hour sector n subsector n rendezvous with N."
Well
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Argh... we're building weapons systems based on windows or mac or linux? What are these people, nuts?
If there was ever a place where capability based security should be used, this is it. An application that has the ability to literally kill people should not be run in an environment which defaults to permissive... this means that ANY application on that system could potentially kill someone.
With the exception of a few wise souls here and there, nobody else seems to get the idea that this kind of thing can be stopped, dead, in its tracks. (Pun intended)
Capability based security offers a path forward to computers that trust nothing by default... the exact opposite of what we have now. They don't have to be unusable, nor layered with ineffective anti-spyware, anti-malware, etc...
Just stop trusting applications, and specify what they can do, as a maximum extent, before you execute them. This limits the damage a rogue (or just confused) application can incur before it's even run.
Now... I've obviously made some typos and a few things could be made clearer in the above... unfortunately /. doesn't allow editing or clarification of a post after it's written... nor does it offer any voting other than a popularity contest... so let the inefficient commenting begin.
Other people call it SkyNet.
A big story goes out about how the drone control system are really seriously compromised. Not only have they detected malware, but they're unable to get rid of it. A few days later, a new story comes out. "Yeah, we totally meant to do that." Only it doesn't even say that. Instead, it says, "Wouldn't it be interesting if they totally meant to do that?"
Even if the malware was installed by some shadowy arm of our government, it's a giant screw up if the guys who are in charge of running the systems didn't keep it out and can't remove it once it's detected. If the guys running the system were competent, the shadowy arm of our own government shouldn't be able to install this crap and more easily than anyone else.
Nice try, though. There is no standard monitoring/keylogging software at that level. Anything below the level of the components in HBSS is selected by each individual Agency/branch/whatever. Many don't employee systems at that low a level at all.
Righttt...
some times lack updates and or get messed up by software pushed by standardization of all systems.
This Monitoring may just be part of some IT tool that some how get's in the way of the Drone software.
To the nth power? Did they check the keylogger for trojans that keylog keyloggers. And trojan riders? And pizza-chainloggers? And KilroyWasHere loggers? And the ever unreported JohnDickandHarryLoggers? More spooks than you can shake a dreamcatcher at.
that this is MORE than enough proof to the military that running windows on weapons systems, esp. flying ones, is a really bad idea. China and Russia spend a LOT of money and effort compromising windows. They themselves are moving their miltiaries to Linux. So now, these other nations will be able to control our bombs, or at least get enough intel to know where we are spying and then take actions. Sadly, USAF is ran increasingly by neo-cons, rather than by military men. Not a brain amongst them.
Since HBSS was identified as the security software that caught the 'virus' I was immediately skeptical. Why? Because HBSS has found and deleted mission-critical software on classified networks before. HBSS was deployed in a hurry because security personnel wanted to lock the network down, and one of the steps that got skipped in a lot of places was coordinating what software is and isn't permitted on the network. Down at the operational level, this translates to an overworked captain or lieutenant passing the memo to whoever in the comms shop has time to do an install (ask yourself: why isn't this person busy?). HBSS gets installed and starts throwing up pop-up windows, and the sergeant, with no training or policy to guide him, helpfully starts making the same kinds of judgments your parents make: "What's SYSTEM32? Sounds dangerous. Deleted!"
This sure sounds like baloney to me. Think about it ... do they not have all kinds of data logging software on these things? Why would the DoD need to be monitoring keystrokes, when they surely have better information available via data logs?
This is simply an attempt to raise uncertainty about the incompetence of our digital security.
This foolish. I can see why they could put keyloggin system for sake of recording actions of their pilots. Was it reporting outside of the UAV's control consoles and command systems? Alot of the UAV Ops are "Black Ops", you'd think CIA/FBI would be aware that the military was trying keep things accountable so they knew point out what happen when a Remote-Control Drone is actual combat.
I can't imagine that these drones have some sort of outside links other than possibly military intranet. US Military is usually paranoid about these high end top secret operations. Combat Drones are cutting edge stuff. I was worried when these Drone started to pop up as combat vehicles, that they could be open to be hacked. I kept remembering the old Chevy Chase movie "Deal of the Century" which painted something similar to that except the hacking / hijacking part.
The keyloggin must been just something forgot to mentioned, UCAVs have to be in a closed system. If their really being hacked, someone just let out high-end secret.
Skynet
Who reported this story? Where is the source from? This headline and then the response makes no sense unless they were trying to flush out a mole or another stupid sympathizer.
The secret plot of the government is to publish all these responses, so the terrorists will read them and be lulled into thinking everyone in America is an idiot.
Just saying.
Well, security updates are important, unless you plan to firewall individual systems (which is an option if you REALLY need to be running unpatched systems, but should be frowned upon and such systems should probably be limited to point-to-point VPNs across the corporate network to specific other systems). Besides, most vendors will support basic OS security patches, or at least can be talked into it.
However, all the desktop junk is a different story. You don't need to push out the latest MS Office upgrade to the server that runs your CNC mill or whatever. It probably doesn't need full-disk encryption either. Oh, and you should probably schedule those patches and not just push them out at some random time when some server is managing a pressure vessel full of explosive gases - do the updates during downtime and re-qualify the system before using it for safety-impacting operations.
At work we do provide close-to-vendor-OS images for things like this, though I'll admit in practice they aren't handled perfectly (again, the push to cut costs).
There is no reason that corporate IT can't be done well - the problem is the bottom-line mentality that aims to put the screws on any budget line item that is large, and which puts the decision-making outside of the group impacted by the decisions.
Left hand meet right hand.
"all i wanted was a pepsi..."
"We have met the enemy and he is us."
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
go away folks, there's nothing there that wasn't built in.... /debug=on
Is it working ?
How long before US military starts a war on another part of US military?