It was never a good day at the base when a virus showed up on the TS networks.


http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/vi...ts-drone-fleet/

Demonstrate that anything not airgapped off from the internet can be affected...

Or hell, in this day and age even air gap may not be enough...

Edit: Memo to self. Read first, comment later...

Yeah, infected thumb drives, pretty much the same way that StuxNet virus got to the Iranian nuclear plants.

On the plus side, since the drone system was airgapped, even if the virus had keylogging and reporting capabilities, it could not actually transmit collected data.



-k

that makes it harder, but not impossible.

Until somebody writes it into the virus to use the drone's transmissions to relay the paydata out of the controlling system.

True, but if it occurred that means it likely wasn't an 'accidental' infection, and someone brought it in deliberately with the intent of gathering data and bringing it back out by other means.

In other words, treason and espionage.



-k

Via some kind of on screen readout perhaps, as i think the drone video ground feed is unencrypted (or used to be).

It was at some point. There was a case where a special forces team found a laptop with hours of video footage from the UAVs.

yep, seems some of the shelf software and a consumer sat dish was all that was needed...

*Headdesk* Sometimes I'm amazed that we, as a species, even were able to find the ripe fruit.

Lets just say that the sharpest knife, figuratively speaking, do not wear uniforms

Never served, but I collect "Idiot REMF" stories from my FLGS/Army Surplus Store. And funny stories. And any other stories the vets and serving members wish to tell. I don't push.

That has actually nothing to do with stupidity, it is arrogance.
Those guys surely knowed about encryption, they just did not to use it. Becaue nobody would be that smart to capture the video stream, besides them.
It was the same thing as the problem with wikileaks. Lets store all our data and give everybody access.
Surely nobody will ever think of leaking, because we are that awesome.

Which in 99% of the alleged "cyberwar" cases did not happen. It's just an ordinary computer system infected by an ordinary piece of malware.

And now the claim is that it may be a internal monitoring system of some kind...

Which is just another form of stupidity when it comes to security.

The weakest link in security is the human one. And humans are an arrogant, arrogant species.