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A comment on International Space Station Infected With USB Stick Malware. Parent comment

Re:International Space Station Infected With USB Stick Malware by freehunter on Monday November 11, 2013 @12:56PM (#6712882)
Who says that Windows is not open to infection? All that was stated is that Linux is open to infection. There's no implication that using another popular OS would have been a better choice.
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Re:International Space Station Infected With USB Stick Malware by AmVess on Monday November 11, 2013 @01:11PM (#6712972)
Well if they used Windows, at least we'd occasionally get free ISS parts showing up in our backyards.

FTR: I'm a Windows user.

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Re:International Space Station Infected With USB Stick Malware by TallGuyShort on Monday November 11, 2013 @02:40PM (#6713476)
Agreed, but it was still quite disingenuous of them to say that Linux was the specific reason they were open to infection. The fact that the space station has computers and ways to connect to those computers means there's a chance of infection.
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Re:International Space Station Infected With USB Stick Malware by freehunter on Monday November 11, 2013 @02:42PM (#6713491)
Viruses are harder to implement on custom software, though. Perhaps the ISS should have used a custom OS to protect against malware? Popular off-the-shelf software is going to be targeted before an in-house and not-publicly-documented piece of software.
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Re:International Space Station Infected With USB Stick Malware by hrkristian on Monday November 11, 2013 @03:36PM (#6713831)
Building an OS from the ground up would take a lot of money and manpower, and NASA aren't exactly rolling in cash nowadays.

And while yes, in-house software would be safe against most existing malware, and general malware, ISS would not be safe from direct attacks. Those are the real threat anyway...

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Re:International Space Station Infected With USB Stick Malware by freehunter on Monday November 11, 2013 @04:28PM (#6714177)
VxWorks is pretty popular with space agencies (NASA uses it, as well as SpaceX. Curiosity and Dragon both run VxWorks RTOS). It has a 64-bit mode for Intel processors, runs on HRFS, DOSFS, and NFS, has IPv6 built in, and is POSIX compliant.

While direct attacks are a real threat, I don't see anywhere saying this was a direct attack. Not using an off-the-shelf OS could have mitigated the attack if it wasn't a direct attack.

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