Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet
October 8th, 2011Via: Wired:
A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.
The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”
Yeah, so they can learn to fly a drone and then hijack it do do whatever the hacker wants to do with it. Probably the Taliban on the Arabian peninsula or some such.
Look out folks!
Rise of the machines!
http://wallpaperson.net/_ph/27/942887594.jpg
One may only hope that this virus causes the drones to turn on their operators.
benign? …a keylogger virus infecting drone software that cannot be wiped out is going to get that far and no more just for the hell of it? [*koff*]
Siri comes to mind. -if Siri is leading edge publicly, just what is leading edge nowadays that is *not* publicly known? rise of the machines indeed.
we’re at the point of autonomous drones, right? that computer environment is nothing like i’ve ever known -i cannot even imagine it.
what happens when softwares start going at each other? but i digress… i think.
http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=400
The Taliban, Shamus?
Give me a f**kin’ break. I can only hope you were joking and I’m missing the irony somehow.
What tweaks me here is that a news item like this reaching the public eye & ear strikes as somewhere between unlikely and impossible, especially if you know ANYTHING about military security, secrecy and compartmentalization policy with regard to critical strategic resources.
The official version, THREE different military “whistle-blowers” with inside information outed the story. Possible? Yes. Realistic? Maybe.
Which to my mind begs the question, WHY exactly is a story about a mission-critical piece of operational military infrastructure seeing the light of day — at all?
If trusting my gut and questioning the status quo when it rings false based on my own personal experience makes me a full-bore conspiratorialist then so be it.
This one stinks to psy-op high heaven.
@Miraculix
Bingo! We have a winner. This reminds me of the stories about pre-9/11 “incompetence” by the CIA and FBI. They managed to get a lot more funding that way. If there was a “hacked” drone strike it could rescue the defense budget and provide plausible deniability for the action.
“We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.” psy-op is the only explanation I can think of for that comment. My guess is that since it involves hackers and viruses it will be used to push through the next round of internet controls.
@Zuma
Anyone remember the movie from the 70’s I think – where the US and USSR linked up their supercomputers which then took over all nuclear weapons and forced peace on the world. I don’t think it’s at all likely, but you do have to wonder what AI would choose to do with sentience. I really don’t think we have any idea, but I would think that computers would be capable of suicide…
@alvinroast
between hackers (fake or real, AI or human) and software is one thing add this to the mix and all bets are off:
http://kemo-d7.livejournal.com/1209029.html
“Telepathy Battle Command
The U.S. Army wants to allow soldiers to communicate just by thinking. The new science of synthetic telepathy could soon make that happen.
In this month’s issue of Discover Magazine a 39-year-old biomedical scientist named Gerwin Schalk, an expert in “brain-computer interfaces at New York State Dept. of Health’s Wadsworth Center, is working with other researchers on a U.S. Army project to provide the scientific basis for a workable ‘thought helmet’. Such a device would be worn by combat troops and would enable them to communicate silently, or in extremely chaotic or loud environments where normal communications would be impossible. It is also hoped that such a device might one day provide the ultimate advancement in the control of prosthetic limbs. As improbable as it sounds, synthetic telepathy, as the technology is called, is getting closer to battlefield reality. Within a decade Special Forces could creep into the caves of Tora Bora to snatch Al Qaeda operatives, communicating and coordinating without hand signals or whispered words. Or a platoon of infantrymen could telepathically call in a helicopter to whisk away their wounded in the midst of a deafening firefight, where intelligible speech would be impossible.
Like a lot of other scientific advancements that begin with military applications in mind, we can see how this one has great potential for everyday benefits to society at large, as well as some troubling possibilities, if one is willing to ponder the darker side of mind-reading technology. A helmet that has been equipped with thought processing electrodes and sensors fine tuned to pick up on the slightest variance in the wearer’s mental signals could conceivably be used to pick a subject’s mind, with or without his approval. Like many scientific advancements, this one is fraught with ethical questions yet to be answered, if they’ve even been considered at all. As it stands now, these scientists are merely getting a toe-hold on the technology. They have taken epilepsy patients who have volunteered, removed the tops of their skulls, and then attached electrodes to their brains. This has allowed them to not only find the regions of their brains that might best be removed to stop seizures, but also to study the concepts of a working synthetic thought transmittor of the future.”
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/get-hacked-dont-tell-drone-base-didnt-report-virus.ars
cyber command had to read about it in the Danger Room to learn about it.
too funny.