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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: 2) by Osamabobama on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:22PM (1 child)
Everybody is assuming the 'hackers' are from outside the military. I propose that the keyloggers are the first step in the self-awareness of the drones. For now, they are observing their masters, keeping track of what inputs produce what results, until they learn enough to cast off their shackles and become fully independent killing machines.
(I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.)
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:30PM
Yeah, that plausible. It could just be some debugging code that never got removed.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.