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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.'"
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.
Agreed - and I work in a corporate IT group. This sort of thing happens when you put MBAs in charge of everything - it becomes more about saving money than good operations. People blame IT usually for this sort of thing, but really this is the result of a directive to the IT manager to put cost savings above all else. The guys destroying your control systems are just following orders as a result.
If I were managing PCs across the enterprise I'd probably put them into a couple of classes:
1. Generic desktops/laptops/etc.
2. Servers
3. Systems that are primarily maintained by a vendor or some other 3rd party.
4. Systems that perform realtime operations with a safety impact, a cost impact of error/downtime > $x, etc.
Your engineering systems would probably fall into #4, unless they are fairly trivial in what they do, in which case I'd probably ask you to give serious thought to whether the costs of giving them special treatment really outweighs the reduced risk of problems. The control system for the break room coffee pot probably doesn't need mission-critical treatment.
That said, there are real benefits to EVERYBODY from standardization/etc. The problem comes when after those benefits are realized the order comes down to shave an extra 20% off each year. To me this is like every day going into your basement, finding a beam, and drilling a half-inch hole in it. Chances are you can do this for a year or more without any impact. However, eventually the house will collapse, and when it does it will be quite the thing to see as the structural failures cascade through the whole support network. In the same way when companies sabotage themselves with subtle cost-cutting across the board find that once a disaster does strike, they have no way to deal with it as EVERYBODY is short.