International Space Station Infected With USB Stick Malware

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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