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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.
No sir. It is not a computer virus.
It is -once again, a Microsoft Windows virus.
Call things by their names.
I can't believe they removed the F8 safe mode function from Windows 10. Now you need to be in Windows to tell it to reboot in safe mode. Good job there. What if your install is fucked and won't boot?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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.