Computer virus hits US Predator and Reaper drone fleet

[lehnerus2000]

Fair enough

I never intended to imply that the President should have to personally conduct the computer recovery procedures, or even an investigation itself. He is responsible for making informed decisions and charging the appropriate military officials to carry them out.

OK, my bad.

However this problem is one that this should never have occurred in the first place...had the President have established an appropriate policy on the manner in which such weaponry is dealt with in the first place.

These sort of problems pre-date the current Administration (and the previous one and the one before that, etc.).

Presumably there are policies regarding IT in the US military.
As the Wikileaks debacle showed, those policies are wrong, out-dated and/or being ignored (take your pick).

The lines of communications between the President and the military are not just some impromptu conversations, in which the President gives some instructions, and blindly trusts that they will be properly carried out. He is supposed to know everything that occurs in the military, above the routine/menial SOP of daily operation.

The President shouldn't have to babysit the Secretary of Defence and/or the Joint Chiefs, though.

If the people below the President are incompetent, then he should replace them.
If they are incompetent and he knows and doesn't replace them, then he should be replaced.


I agree that no matter who is responsible for the original policies, the current Administration should be fixing problems when the occur (preferably before they occur).

 

[Layback Bear]

The DIA, NSA and NSC should jump all over this.The JCS should look into where the ball was dropped. We need to hear from Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey that this problem is taken care of.

 

[seekermeister]

lehnerus2000,

It appears that we are at an impasse, because while we agree on the ultimate goal, we have very different basic concepts of how it should be obtained and retained. Military personnel, regardless of their rank or office, should not make policies, only execute them. The only exception is when it is not possible for an official decision to be obtained from the White House. Even then, any ad hoc policy should only be created as necessary due to time and circumstance.

I realize that this manner of governing is not a comfortable idea for liberals to deal with, because it would mean that they would actually need to elect officials, including the President, that actually have true merit, rather than just a form of public appeal. However, if this country is to continue as we all desire, we must adhere to the principles that this country were founded on.

 

[A Guy]

Air Force Disputes Drone Keylogger Report

The U.S. Air Force on Wednesday downplayed a recent malware attack on its systems, insisting that its unmanned aircraft, or drones, were never in danger and that the virus did not include a keylogger.

The malware affected the Windows-based, portable hard drives used by those at Nevada's Creech Air Force Base to transfer information between systems. It was a "credential stealer, not a keylogger, found routinely on computer networks and is considered more of a nuisance than an operational threat," the Air Force said in a statement.

Source

A Guy

 

[seekermeister]

For me, it is not relevant whether the malware was a serious threat or not, the fact that any kind of malware was found is, and the fact that the systems are vulnerable in the fashion that they are is even greater concern.

 

[lehnerus2000]

100%

For me, it is not relevant whether the malware was a serious threat or not, the fact that any kind of malware was found is, and the fact that the systems are vulnerable in the fashion that they are is even greater concern.

On this point, I agree with you 100%.

 

[Stratos]

It is not a matter of it being necessary to have military personnel being able to write their own AV code, because I seriously doubt that the virus that they are having problems with is unique. It is a matter of how to properly employ existing AV code to combat the issue effectively. There are other ways of delivering that code to their systems, without using the internet. If a simple home user can deal with AVs on their computer, I see now reason that the military shouldn't be able to do the same, but in a secure fashion.

AV is not a fix-all solution. AV can be implemented at many levels but you won't reach 100% efficiency or close to it. AV is mitigation, not prevention. Prevention starts at the OS level. Look up TLD4 which is a type of rootkit, no matter how many times you scan your machine with AV, it'll always come back because it lodges itself deep in the MBR (master boot record). So in that sense, traditional AV mitigation techniques don't work.

What happens in a home is nothing like dealing with a military network of computers, it's easy to manage 3-5 machines at home, unrestricted in what you can do. The Gov't has policies which you must follow, just for starters.

Also you need to remember, no AV can detect something it doesn't know, and that includes Heuristics. Heuristics is a method for guessing what it might think is a suspicious action, if set too low it's pointless to have the feature, set too high and it starts to generate false-positives. Heuristics also add time to scanning for both realtime and manual scans.

It seems obvious to me, that for the virus to be introduced in the first place, that either it came from the internet, or was directly injected by a saboteur. I suspect that the internet is the probable culprit, because I would bet that some bored systems operators decided to play games or browse some porn on the internet.

Email's another possibility but it's highly unlikely due to how Exchange servers are managed in the military. There's another major issue you left out, and that's called "drive by" web attacks. Windows is not immune to them, and some can bypass and circumvent UAC and DEP completely without user interaction or privilege escalation.

 

[mr pc]

Skynet

 

[Layback Bear]

Bull droppings; can't stop drive by's. I can't believe our most secret things can't be protected. They dropped the ball on Security 101. No transferring any thing with any plug in,( USB, C/D). Also no internet. We have are own satellites and methods of sending things in micro/sec/encrypted. Some body in our own house dropped the ball. Their is a snake in the wood pile.