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.'"

Comments

Plausible Deniability to Assassinate People

[Ron Bennett]

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.

Re:Plausible Deniability to Assassinate People

[Anonymous Coward]

Or they could just do what they've been doing all along and label anyone on the wrong end of their detached and indiscriminate bombings as "enemy combatants." It works well enough at home and I sincerely doubt that the people living in fear of drone strikes respect appreciate their presence to begin with. "It wasn't me that upset the bear I put in your house, it was those guys over there!"

Re:Yeah, um, they MEANT to do that...

[Anonymous Coward]

To anyone who's spent any time dealing with military computer security, unfortunately, this really isn't a surprise.

To anyone who's spent any time dealing with computers, unfortunately, this really isn't a surprise.

Stuxnet was really Iranian

[AntiBasic]

The centrifuges were designed to act that way.

Re:Who cares?

[maxwell demon]

Haven't killing machines been guilt free since the invention of the bow and arrow? Not having to look your enemy in the eye makes things a lot easier.

The machines always have been guilt-free. It was always the humans who were guilty.

Security Researcher? What a joke!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[ozmanjusri]

I have no issues what so ever eliminating hate filled hypocritical pustules

When do you plan to set drones loose on Washington?

Complete speculation

[evilviper]

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.

Spin?

[astrashe]

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.