Trojan Kill Switches In Military Technology 392
Nrbelex writes "The New York Times reports in this week's Science section that hardware and software trojan kill switches in military devices are an increasing concern, and may have already been used. 'A 2007 Israeli Air Force attack on a suspected, partly-constructed Syrian nuclear reactor led to speculation about why the Syrian air defense system did not respond to the Israeli aircraft. Accounts of the event initially indicated that sophisticated jamming technology was used to blind the radars. Last December, however, a report in an American technical publication, IEEE Spectrum, cited a European industry source in raising the possibility that the Israelis might have used a built-in kill switch to shut down the radars. Separately, an American semiconductor industry executive said in an interview that he had direct knowledge of the operation and that the technology for disabling the radars was supplied by Americans to the Israeli electronic intelligence agency, Unit 8200.'"
Re:Open Source (Score:4, Funny)
It's not very sophisticated after all (Score:5, Funny)
(ring)
Hello. Syrian Air Defence.
Hello, Mr. Air Defence. My name is Raji - I mean Bob - from technical support. I have a service request you made on your Acme 2001 Target Tracking Module.
What? We are not having problem with that -
Now, now. I have to clear this ticket, Mr. Air Defence. You wouldn't want me to get into trouble, would you?
Well, no, I guess not.
Ah. Good then. Please reboot your system and we can get started solving your problem.
Re:Thatcher and Argentina (Score:4, Funny)
This happens quite often in many devices (Score:5, Funny)
My PC for sure has a kill switch somewhere. Now and then an odd blue screen with a funny message appears on the screen. I wonder who is operating the switch and why...
Re:Lesson learned? (Score:3, Funny)
Dont buy important technology from foreign countries, do it yourself. Especially if you ever under any way, shape or form could cross paths with said foreign country. I think this should be a really big wakeup call to european countries that relies 100% on american tech, both on hardware and software.
Why? Is America planning to invade France?
Re:Open Source (Score:4, Funny)
Army no! An already organized unruly mob of idiots.
Re:Lesson learned? (Score:3, Funny)
Really, I don't think the Terrans are prepared for a war with the Sirians right now. They out number us all to hell, and our economy's kind of creaky already. Try diplomacy instead. And low budget secret agent stuff during the delay.
all you need is an authentication server (Score:1, Funny)
"That's the thing with military hardware, once you sell it to somebody, there's very little you can do to keep them from passing it to somebody else. In that context"
OH see they are trying to fix that. You only need to setup an "authentication server" that the software that runs the hardware phones home to every time you boot it up. If you no longer want the party to run the stuff they legally payed for you simply shut down the authentication server. This works especially well when the next version of it comes out and you dont want them useing the old version forever so you can force them to upgrade to the newest version.