<story><title>Computer virus hits US Predator and Reaper drone fleet</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/exclusive-computer-virus-hits-drone-fleet.ars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JonnieCache</author><text>If I&apos;m ever in charge of a PC capable of firing guns at people, then at a bare minimum I would disable the USB bus entirely, I probably wouldn&apos;t fit a NIC either. I&apos;d also definitely install some of that software that makes the HDD read only and transparently passes through all writes to RAM. Fuckit, if I&apos;m the US military I&apos;d develop such a device in hardware. Send the recorded video/telemetry data to a write-only volume.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s not that hard.&lt;p&gt;But anyway, my point was that I don&apos;t for a second believe that they&apos;re this incompetent, there must be other factors at play.</text></item><item><author>rdl</author><text>There are hundreds of thousands of machines and millions of removable drives.  Tracking down every last instance of a piece of malware and then dealing with it is quite hard at that scale.  Usually they fall back on policy (&quot;no usb/removable drives&quot;)&lt;p&gt;They&apos;re handicapped by a need AND compulsion to use contractors for everything.  Actual government employees didn&apos;t build drones; they were all developed and in many cases largely maintained and even operated by private contractors, working to government requirements (which themselves are structured to make the contractors inefficient, compared to normal commercial companies).  Same thing with networks.</text></item><item><author>JonnieCache</author><text>Like hugh says, this doesn&apos;t add up at all.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;“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.”&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;C&apos;mon. You&apos;re the &lt;i&gt;military.&lt;/i&gt; &quot;It just keeps coming back?&quot; So you decide to do a press release about it? Please.&lt;p&gt;I wouldn&apos;t have whined like that when I was de-malwareing neighbourhood PCs at age 13, I would have &lt;i&gt;fixed it&lt;/i&gt;. If I can successfully keep malware off the PCs of middle aged parents with teenaged children, then the government capable of developing and operating fleets of &lt;i&gt;unmanned military drones&lt;/i&gt; can certainly isolate a network and disable the USB bus.&lt;p&gt;There is definitely some high level shit going on right here. I doubt we&apos;ll know about it for many years, if ever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghshephard</author><text>&quot;I would disable the USB bus entirely&quot;
  So how would you support Mice, Keyboards and Joysticks?  And how long would it take you to retrofit all of the some 100K+ PCs rated &quot;secret&quot; or above in the Government?</text></comment>
<story><title>Computer virus hits US Predator and Reaper drone fleet</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/exclusive-computer-virus-hits-drone-fleet.ars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JonnieCache</author><text>If I&apos;m ever in charge of a PC capable of firing guns at people, then at a bare minimum I would disable the USB bus entirely, I probably wouldn&apos;t fit a NIC either. I&apos;d also definitely install some of that software that makes the HDD read only and transparently passes through all writes to RAM. Fuckit, if I&apos;m the US military I&apos;d develop such a device in hardware. Send the recorded video/telemetry data to a write-only volume.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s not that hard.&lt;p&gt;But anyway, my point was that I don&apos;t for a second believe that they&apos;re this incompetent, there must be other factors at play.</text></item><item><author>rdl</author><text>There are hundreds of thousands of machines and millions of removable drives.  Tracking down every last instance of a piece of malware and then dealing with it is quite hard at that scale.  Usually they fall back on policy (&quot;no usb/removable drives&quot;)&lt;p&gt;They&apos;re handicapped by a need AND compulsion to use contractors for everything.  Actual government employees didn&apos;t build drones; they were all developed and in many cases largely maintained and even operated by private contractors, working to government requirements (which themselves are structured to make the contractors inefficient, compared to normal commercial companies).  Same thing with networks.</text></item><item><author>JonnieCache</author><text>Like hugh says, this doesn&apos;t add up at all.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;“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.”&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;C&apos;mon. You&apos;re the &lt;i&gt;military.&lt;/i&gt; &quot;It just keeps coming back?&quot; So you decide to do a press release about it? Please.&lt;p&gt;I wouldn&apos;t have whined like that when I was de-malwareing neighbourhood PCs at age 13, I would have &lt;i&gt;fixed it&lt;/i&gt;. If I can successfully keep malware off the PCs of middle aged parents with teenaged children, then the government capable of developing and operating fleets of &lt;i&gt;unmanned military drones&lt;/i&gt; can certainly isolate a network and disable the USB bus.&lt;p&gt;There is definitely some high level shit going on right here. I doubt we&apos;ll know about it for many years, if ever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>khafra</author><text>How does the PC make the drone 10,000 miles away fire the missiles once you take the NIC out?</text></comment>