Predator Drone 'Virus' Could Be Military's Own Monitoring 99
Posted
by
timothy
from the anything's-possible dept.
from the anything's-possible dept.
jjp9999 writes "The virus that hit Predator and Reaper UAVs could be an internal monitoring system employed by the military. According to security researcher Miles Fidelman, there are vendors that sell security monitoring packages to the Defense Department which are 'essentially rootkits that do, among other things, key logging.' The virus is a keylogger that was found at pilot stations, and could be keeping tabs on keystrokes used by pilots to control the UAVs, found Wired's Danger Room blog. Fidelman adds, 'I kind of wonder if the virus that folks are fighting is something that some other part of DoD deployed intentionally.'"
Wow... why are they using ...oh yeah, cost... (Score:3, Informative)
Argh... we're building weapons systems based on windows or mac or linux? What are these people, nuts?
If there was ever a place where capability based security should be used, this is it. An application that has the ability to literally kill people should not be run in an environment which defaults to permissive... this means that ANY application on that system could potentially kill someone.
With the exception of a few wise souls here and there, nobody else seems to get the idea that this kind of thing can be stopped, dead, in its tracks. (Pun intended)
Capability based security offers a path forward to computers that trust nothing by default... the exact opposite of what we have now. They don't have to be unusable, nor layered with ineffective anti-spyware, anti-malware, etc...
Just stop trusting applications, and specify what they can do, as a maximum extent, before you execute them. This limits the damage a rogue (or just confused) application can incur before it's even run.
Now... I've obviously made some typos and a few things could be made clearer in the above... unfortunately /. doesn't allow editing or clarification of a post after it's written... nor does it offer any voting other than a popularity contest... so let the inefficient commenting begin.