Virus infects space station!
Published on Aug 31, 2008 at 5:06 pm.
4 Comments.
Filed under space station.
How’s that for a headline? I’ve been an avid science fiction fan since I was a child, and this sounds like the sort of thing that is perfect for a B grade movie. It is a pretty common plot in science fiction for some alien virus to run rampant killing people, turning them into zombies, or some such. Even some really good science fiction has been based on tat premise, such as the Andromeda Strain, which is known by many movie that is based on an very good book. Only this time, the story is not science fiction. A virus actually did get on board the International Space Station. Thankfully, it was not one the killer science fiction viruses. Instead, it was a relatively tame computer virus. The virus was the W32.Gammima.AG worm.
This story actually broke last week, but I was busy with the getting the new semester going at my college. On top of that, I was fighting my own computer problem. Someone had been trying to hack into my page to upload some spammy things. They didn’t get past my security, but they were hitting my site about 5 or 6 times per second trying to get in. It got to be such a load on my site that my hosting company suspending my account for about a day. Now, that had me pretty, because they were making it out to be my fault that my account was using too much cpu time and bandwidth. Yeah. I suppose that if I had lowered security and let the spammers upload anything that they wanted, then I’d not have been such a drain on my host’s resources. I wasn’t all that happy with them. And, I am even more unhappy with the people who write these viruses, worms, spam, and all the hackers trying to upload things to other people’s pages. Even my college was hit. I was trying to show my students things on my web page for the first day of the semester. But, instead of my page loading correctly, it tried to display a message in Chinese characters. It wasn’t just my page. All of the other faculty were similarly hit. Interestingly, the attacks on Astroprof’s Page were also from China, and the virus that made it to the ISS was targeted at stealing passwords to online games popular in China. It sounds like something is going on over there. With all of the limits placed on internet access by the media during the Olympic games, you’d think that the Chinese government would care about the computer crimes being committed there.
So, how did this virus get on board the space station? The computers there do not have direct internet access. Everything has to go through ground control (where presumably a virus would be detected). The best guess would be that an astronaut or cosmonaut brought their own personal USB flash drive that had the virus on it. In fact, one of the ways that this particular virus spreads is apparently through removable media, so that makes sense. The flash drive could have been used on Earth to load data, programs, or files from a vulnerable computer. Then, once it was used in orbit, it could infect computers there. If that is how the virus got there, then presumably NASA would require all removable media to be screened for viruses as a precaution before going into space. I know that is a hassle, but it is better than allowing something up there that could be a problem. This one was pretty tame, but some can damage files and cause computers to slow down or perform their tasks incorrectly. Many are not so tame. In fact, I’d have imagined that it would have long been a policy to screen all computers and computer media before launch. If so, then someone may have been sloppy with procedure, or this may have been something that did not get caught by the anti-virus software. No AV software is perfect. It can miss things. I know a number of people who run two or more anti-virus programs, plus anti-spyware programs, plus firewalls. The only problem with that, though, is that it takes a boatload of memory to just run all of the protective software, leaving little for actual computing. Again, this makes me mad that all of the bad guys out there are making the rest of us have to spend money and computing resources to protect ourselves against such malicious attacks. Something ought to be done to stop them other than leaving it up to the individual to do all of the work protecting themselves.
-Astroprof
tobias on September 1, 2008 at 7:00 am: 1
Man, just use linux.
tobias on September 1, 2008 at 7:03 am: 2
Another thing to note is the name of the virus. “W32.something” are names given to 32 bits windows environments. They are using windows in a space station?!?!
Astroprof on September 1, 2008 at 2:48 pm: 3
Actually, my understanding is that the computers on board use a variety of operating systems. But, of course, linux is far less susceptible to virus attacks than windows.
Krohon on September 2, 2008 at 6:35 am: 4
Main Space Station computers should be physically isolated from the Internet and external media like pen drives, there is no other way to expect a bit of security.
Well, turning them off will also work.