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Boeing Hit By WannaCry Virus, Fears It Could Cripple Some Jet Production (seattletimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Seattle Times: Boeing was hit Wednesday by the WannaCry computer virus, raising fears within the company that it could cripple some vital airplane production equipment. Mike VanderWel, chief engineer at Boeing Commercial Airplane production engineering, sent out an alarming memo calling for "All hands on deck." "It is metastasizing rapidly out of North Charleston and I just heard 777 (automated spar assembly tools) may have gone down," VanderWel wrote, adding that he's concerned the virus will hit equipment used in functional tests of airplanes ready to roll out and potentially "spread to airplane software." Indicating widespread alarm within the company at the potential impact, VanderWel said the attack required "a battery-like response," a reference to the 787 in-flight battery fires in 2013 that grounded the world's fleet of Dreamliners and led to an extraordinary three-month-long engineering effort to find a fix.
A monoculture of OS.
No sir. It is not a computer virus.
It is -once again, a Microsoft Windows virus.
Call things by their names.
Thanks again, NSA! Glad you had our backs...
And what OS are they running?
Hey you business types who moan about not enough time to test updates and that it takes away from software projects that will generate income?
Pay attention.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Microsoft to sell computer games about flying.
Use a real OS that has real security for real work.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I thought a BSOD mid air would be enough to make running windows on a plane completely insane.
Sounds like Donald Trump needs to get the Russians, Chinese and North Koreans to pay for a firewall.
I bet wannacry will never hit an Antanov.
This is why my back-up drives aren't connected to my computer 24-7. When I finish backing up stuff, I disconnect the drive(s).
Come on people, you gotta be smarter than this by now.
Stupidity, or greed? I mean, sure, all the seven deadly sins are at play, but in what order?
No sir. It is not a computer virus.
It is -once again, a Microsoft Windows virus.
Call things by their names.
Boeing got hit by Wanna Cry
Would that make their planes Wanna Fall Down From The Sky ??
One of these days this virus is going to hit the wrong person and the authors are all going to wind up dead.
I'm very interested to hear what Boeing vice president Phil Musser has to say about this event given his reported comment just 2 days ago in response to the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle 'that the company has “rigorous IT and security protocols.”'.
Why allow a single user keypress to decide what to do when a broken os might be able to figure it out after 10 minutes of failed boot. BRILLIANT!
Have gnu, will travel.
Boeing used to be one of the world's most competent corporations.
Then they merged with McDonnellDouglas. They absorbed the McD defense products, and then the morons in the board room replaced a bunch of Boeing's old management structures with the McD people. The McD teams used to outsource more stuff, whereas the old Boeing people used to do stuff more in-house. This came to a head with the 787 program which ended up over budget and behind schedule in large part because Boeing, which used to do everything inhouse, was under the new management oursourcing parts all over the planet and bringing the parts into the Boeing facilities for final assy - a tactic the McD guys were used to but the boeing people and systems were not. The results were entirely predictable to anybody without an MBA degree.
The idea that the new & reckless Boeing management was running their internal systems on the super-crappy Windows operating system is both predictable and sad. These clowns should not be trusted with national security projects - they probably store all their stuff unencrypted in the cloud and run their Windows machines unpatched and without antivirus protections and hardware firewalls.
This is the company that has been charging billions of dollars per year for nearly a decade to convert a shuttle external tank into a 1st stage booster - which they MIGHT be able to fly manned 20 years after the design started. Incidentally, the SLS design was specifically chosen to re-use shuttle heritage hardware, including engines and engine plumbing stripped directly from working orbiters, in order to accellerate development time and save money [sigh]. While Musk at SpaceX has been moving to re-usable rockets, Boeing is actually regressing to throwing away expensive reusable shuttle engines on each SLS launch!
Same company that has been studying blended-wing-body airframes for 20+ years without builing a single manned example. The old Boeing could design a readically new aircraft and get a test article onto a flight line in MONTHS.
This virus incident is just the most-recent evidence that the federal government was completely incompetent when they allowed Boeing to absorb North American aviation, Rockwell International's aerospace division, Bell helicopter, McDonnellDouglas (itself a merger of McDonnell Aircraft, Douglas Aircraft, Convair and Consolidated) and others. Huge bloated incompetent defense contractors lose all interest in being efficient and competent as they become hooked on cost-plus government contracts combined with lack of competition resulting from the absorption of most or all competitors.
a company of this size making the kind of airplanes, space components and required software simply does not have these holes protruding into their critical systems. This was clearly done from the inside, and yet somehow I bet they will blame it on Russia.
Since the NHS were admonished for not installing patches which would have prevented Wanacry in May 2017, Boeing really should have patched their systems by now.
they are worried it might spread to airplane software.
thanks, knowing this, now i'll be worried every time i fly with boeing.
Wonder if this has anything to do with the Russian expulsions and closing of the consulate in Seattle that is considered too close to US submarine base and Boeing's operations?
Unlike so many the succumb to ransomware, I expect that Boeing had good defenses - practices and systems - in place to defend against ransomware and intrusion. It's possible or even probable that they had the best systems in place
Ransomware has been my biggest security fear for the last couple of years and defending against ransomware and the possibility of infection has been my biggest spend as well as time-sink for the past couple of years. The idea of a department or the entire company being infected scares the shit out of me.
I'd very much like to know exactly which systems Boeing had implemented. I'd like to know which systems failed so dramatically.
What happened to the "kill switch"? Was it removed or something? I thought WannaCry was a non-issue now because of that.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Isn't there a tool that finds the key in memory and automatically decrypts the files.
First thing that comes to mind; the multiple layers of backups and images needed to assure recovery from these events. In a dynamic manufacturing environment, I would want stackable images, possibly hourly delta backups, maybe even run things in VMs with on-and off-line redundancy. I would be diving my VMware rep insane with demands to port the images into KVM or virtualbox, and always at the lowest possible version to permit restoration despite underlying OS or environmental changes... Data separation to avoid losing it all in a half hour.
Then and only then would I go back to fretting over the network security team and all the layers of intrusion detection and prevention.
And a lab full of honeypots to try and identify the vermin before they find the real cheese. Because if I had Boeing as a client or employer, I would know I work for one of the most coveted targets on Earth. Not just script kiddies, but jerks, paid criminals, state actors, and competitive industrial spies. Everyone with an Android phone or a RasPi. Everyone. Even Facebook.
And I would probably be redesigning the data assurance system yearly, just to keep refining it with the latest options.
Intel certainly deals with this. They are an information company, and losing tools due to these threats should be unacceptable. Not merely airgap security for production tooling, but for all company IP. No other way. Seems like Boeing had a hole. Darn.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
NSA is not the ones to blame. You can and should blame companies for no longer taking security serious. Boeing has had ages to update their computers, yet have done nothing. Likewise, even now, they are pouring money into places like Russia to make titanium, and vietnam, China, and India are doing software for Boeing ( India works closely with Russia on military projects ). Boeing and other companies are to blame.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You can do better than that. Surely China was to blame somehow?
You would do this all from your Mamas Basement.
Here is the protip: Boeing is highly connected with thousands of suppliers, contractors and customers. They cannot simply disconnect themselves from the rest of the world. They almost certainly use lots of Windows-only stuff such as CAD packages. They employ a literal army of people, most of whom are not IT specialists. These folks must collaborate to keep the company running. Exchanging Emails, CAD files, scientific calculations, Excel-past parts list and lots of other Office documents. If you lock them down fully, the whole enterprise comes to a standstill.
So: Basement Consulting LLC should come up with a concept that balances security and business needs.
You bet the Russians are already spreading false information in the Antonov computers they control. Which is all of them plus the personal computers of the Antonov employees.
Ukraine is a fully corrupt s-hole and it has only become worse since Merkel and America have meddled in Ukraine.
Now, what happens if the crypto virus starts to encrypt your backup files as soon as you attach them to the computer ?
Or do you buy a new backup medium every 14 days ???
Or even worse, what happens if the virus slightly modifies the files in such a manner that they still nicely load into Excel, Powerpoint, AutoCAD etc, but changes the data slightly ? Then you cannot trust your nice backup any more.
So you create an optical transmission channel and by means of MAGIC malware is not transmitted by the optical channel ? Or is it a one-way channel ? You can get that much more reliable, easier and cheaper by using DVDs which are never again inserted into the source computer.
One more question: Who stole your brain ?
Elite female Russian secret warriors looked too deeply into the eyes of Boeing managers. So they downloaded the viruses in some sort of trance by themselves, directly from www.evil-virus-of-russ.RU. All subconsciously, of course.
Fight back Boeing! Reverse engineer that SOB and re-issue it into the wild as the WannaFly simulation!
Old Boeing management did not do it, so they did not develop that skillset and the proper managerial tools.
McDonnellDouglas did it, but were a bit of a shambles in other areas, rendering them weak enough to become an aquisition target from Boeing.
When the McD managers with their outsourcing dreams were put into positions at Boeing which was not experienced with outsourcing at that scale, things bubbled along OK for years with existing products, but when the new 787 came along and all the dreams of turning Boeing into a major outsourcer were put in place to [hopefully] drive up stock prices, things got really messy in a hurry.
The Europeans, on the other hand, had a long experience with outsourcing on major aerospace projects like Concorde - for them and Airbus it was a standard way of doing things.