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International Space Station Infected With Malware Carried By Russian Astronauts
DavidGilbert99 writes "Nowhere is safe. Even in the cold expanse of space, computer malware manages to find a way. According to Russian security expert Eugene Kaspersky, the SCADA systems on board the International Space Station have been infected by malware which was carried into space on USB sticks by Russian astronauts."
From the article As these systems are based on Linux, they are open to infection.
What system is not open to infection...
So who's idea was it to to allow a foreign USB stick to get plugged into a ISS system with root access? This seems like a major security protocol problem rather than a weakness of Linux.
When all else fails, run.
If a guy on the street was screaming that the NSA was tapping the phones of world leaders, we would have called him crazy. The fact that it later came out that the NSA was tapping the phones of world leaders doesn't retroactively make that person not crazy. Or was your point "Yes, I may be crazy, but sometimes crazy people are coincidentally correct!" I'm sure there are paranoid schizophrenic people that are right now being investigated by the FBI -- but they are still paranoid schizophrenic.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
The ISS is nothing more than a thinly veiled weapons platform cloaked as a space station. Rods from God is the ultimate weapon, inflicting nuclear scale devastation without the pesky fallout. Within our lifetimes expect to see an attack launched and the USA will claim that they had no part in it, when in reality they will be the instigating party with plausible deniability.
Why would the Rods from God project require a manned platform? Especially an international crew that would be likely to discover the device and report it back to their own respective countries?
First it spends a paragraph or two indicating that some unknown computer on ISS got a virus. That would probably be one of the Windows laptops used by the crew for personal email, general browsing, etc and NOT a mission critical part of the station itself. Those have gotten viruses before and probably will again. The mission critical systems never have.
Then they went into the weeds spending a short segment talking about an unnamed system at an unnamed nuclear plant getting infected with stuxnet. For all we know it was the solitaire and minesweeper PC in the break room. From there they talk about government development of stuxnet and blah blah blah nothing to do with ISS, and so on.
The claim that NSA was spying on everyone was believable. In fact, I had sort of expected that happening. On the other hand, the claim that these "rods from god" can violate fundamental laws of physics, including the law of conservation of energy, to achieve "nuclear scale devastation", smells not only of thinking patterns of a conspiracy theorist but rather of sheer lunacy (or lack of high school education, or both).
Ezekiel 23:20
When you see "Russian", "USB key", "malware" and "SCADA" in a sentence you should automatically think Stuxnet, which TFA talks about at length. Stuxnet, happily, only attacks centrifuges, and is generally very sophisticated about staying out of the way. The chances of any complications happening spontaneously are somewhere between "Hollywood movie plot" and "political promise."
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!