Friday, October 7, 2011

Update from the Front in the On-Going Computer War

Two years ago the US/Israel opened that latest offensive in the War of the Worlds that may be the Götterdämmerung of our civilization. They released the Stuxnet virus to degrade the Iranian attempt to build nuclear weapons.

In the interim, China has used viruses and worms sneak into computers around the war probably in preparation for opening a new front in the Computer Wars.

Now there is a mysterious outbreak of a virus in the US's drone fleet. It isn't clear who has unleashed this new attack and what the intentions of the probe may be.

We are in the fog of war and in the opening stages of WWIII.

From Wired magazine:
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 warzones.

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 U.S. 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.”

Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.
Go read the whole article.

Most wars are fought with the bottom 90% of the population in a fog. We will be victims of this new war. We will have our economies wrecked, lives lost, and most of us won't even know there are battles going on, who is involved, and what kinds of devastation are being inflicted. We are like the serfs of the Middle Ages. Our feudal lords (the top 1% who control the government and military) are fielding armies that scourge the land and we know nothing about it until the armed columns descend upon our tiny village and put us all to the sword.

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