Malware reaches space station
Autorun worm found on non-critical systems.
US space agency NASA has confirmed reports that laptops in use on the international space station have been found to
have been infected with password-stealing malware.
The infected systems are said to be non-mission-critical and used by space station crew for email and recording data
from 'nutritional experiments'. According to NASA spokespeople, all systems are isolated from the web and all data
must pass through supposedly secure indirect links. However, as the malware in question appears to be a worm which
spreads via USB sticks, it seems likely that the infection was introduced in this manner, and that the systems
had not had autorun disabled, a fairly basic security step. It is not clear whether the more vital computer
systems on the station use the same tight isolation methods.
The infection was discovered during a 'routine scan' with Symantec's Norton product, and was
apparently not the first such incident, hinting that resident scanning was not in use. Other systems are now having
Norton installed on them.
Full details are at Wired
here or at ITWire
here.
29 August 2008
Tags:
autorun, security flaw, space exploration, trojan.
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