Posted on 08/27/2008 9:38:14 AM PDT by Swordmaker
A computer virus is alive and well on the International Space Station (ISS).
NASA has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS in July were infected with a virus known as Gammima.AG.
The worm was first detected on Earth in August 2007 and lurks on infected machines waiting to steal login names for popular online games.
Nasa said it was not the first time computer viruses had travelled into space and it was investigating how the machines were infected. Orbital outbreak
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
Bet I can guess the OS it was running...hehehe
‘Tis time to send Russia a large bill, with interest, for all time and materials invested in the space station, then cut our losses and build our own. The friendship (that never was) is cold again.
>>Bet I can guess the OS it was running...hehehe>>
Must be Linux... my Apple died of a virus last year.
Aww, some poor astronaut’s World Of Warcraft account got hacked and all of his purples got sharded. That’s brutal.
We will only be out Billions. /sarcasm
That would be a headline news story, if true. "Death by virus" didn't even happen on the original Mac OS (1-9).
Details?
ORLY
Besides the fact that there are only two OSX viruses in the wild, neither one of them has the capacity to kill a system.
What virus was that?
Which two are those? I know of a couple of Trojan programs masquerading as video codecs, but no self-replicating, self-transmitting OS X viruses.
Experts have determined the virus is called “Microsoft Vista” and are taking steps to remove it immediately.
jas3
Neither OSX.Oompa-Loompa.A (also called OSX.Leap.A) nor OSX.Inqtana.A are viruses—although both Oompa and Inqtana had code that was supposed to make them self-transmitting—nor have they ever been seen outside of a computer security company lab. They were proof-of-concept Trojans that DID NOT WORK.
Inqtana was an attempt to create a virus that would spread over Bluetooth. It was supposed to then write itself to all files in its home folder (ignoring the fact that OS X prevents that from happening). To receive it the victim would have to accept a download over Bluetooth from an unknown source, giving permission to do so, the install it, again giving permission to the system to do so, and then run it for the first time, also giving permission. In reality it was merely a failed Trojan. Inqtana tried to exploit a vulnerability in Bluetooth that had been closed for over a year at the time.
Oompa was another attempt at self-transmission, this time attempting to infect Bonjour active computers on a LAN. It took two Apple software Engineers, two computer security specialists from Secunia, and some journalists from Macworld over six hours to merely get it to copy itself to the target Mac... and then it didn't work. Again, it was a proof-of-concept.
Both were two-day wonders in the computer punditry and then were recognized for what they were. They were never in the wild.
I'm not surprised that both require extreme measures to get them to actually do anything at all and that they won't actually propagate.
Our original poster that said that a Mac virus killed his computer is most certainly wrong.
He may have had his Mac die of some kind of hardware failure, but not due to a virus.
Although I find a lot of Microsofties that say the same thing. "A virus killed my PC!!!"
No, a virus may have killed your Windows OS. But you can't format it and install a fresh copy of your OS then it's a hardware problem.
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