The US military's unmanned Predator and Reaper drones are continuing to fly remote missions overseas despite a computer virus that has infected their US-based cockpits.

Government officials are still investigating whether the virus is benign, and how it managed to infect the heavily protected computer systems at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, where US military pilots remotely fly the planes on their missions over Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

"Something is going on, but it has not had any impact on the missions overseas," said a source, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

. . .

Rob Densmore, former US navy airman, told Al Jazeera that the infection was a common keystroke logging virus - which registers the keystrokes pilots use to control the unmanned drones from afar.

"It has to have a point of access, so we know that thumb drives - basically USB drives - are used to upload navigational information, guidance information to Predator and Reaper drones.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2011/10/201110816388104988.html

babyfinland posted:

Myfanwy posted:
It's interesting, because it's a very us military sort of excuse. US Jets are never ever ever shot down, they just manage to have tons of mechanical problems while receiving enemy fire during sorties. Computer viruses that record you committing war crimes are totally unrelated to any hacking or state actors

Plus everything that WIRED writes about the us military is spoonfed to them in the same way it would be if it was in USA TODAY.
The US military is so horribly vulnerable, it's a good thing it will be never be in a war with a powerful state , because things would go so badly

WIRED actually has a pretty good intel / mil column, it suprised me

Well they do write opinions and try to be informed, but it's all very "gee whiz lockheed martin has a laser that can shoot a guy but not if its cloudy or raining, what a great system, look at this new tech, wowie"

There are some surprisingly good military blogs written by pmcs and soliders, the view on the ground is interesting. It's like the larger reasons for these conflicts have become so well known and are so gross that nobody even wants to bother discussing it.

I also hate that just saying this stuff makes me worry about being surveiled

camera_obscura posted:
Am i reading a sort of subtext to your post where you imply that civilian sources about this sort of thing are unreliable?

I think that I was saying that civilian sources who are just repeating what they're told by Military Sources are very unreliable? I suppose you learn how to find the truth