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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 war zones.
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 US 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."
The NSA was too busy reading your little sister's diary to fix it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @12:25PM (1 child)
'apparently benign'
Cool, they found a new way to say 'what could possibly go wrong with that'.
Um, the keystroke logger is running code of the bad guys choosing on a machine where the keystrokes cause real things to happen.
So for example, what if the code starting operating in reverse and the bad guys started supplying the keystrokes.
Why is the computer hooked up so the code can phone home with it's booty?
Where is home?
Hopefully, they are capturing every packet in and out of the machine for further analysis.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:26PM
No. What this means is they got a keylogger virus that wasn't even targeted at them, and they still can't remove it. I don't know how much faith to put in their assertions that no data has been leaked, but since the thing was probably trying to get credit card numbers or some such it probably hasn't seen anything worth trying to report.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.