Posted on 04/03/2011 2:24:58 PM PDT by MamaDearest
MALICIOUS hacking software that could force a passenger jet to nosedive has been developed.
Security representatives at the Asia-Pacific Aviation Security conference, which included representatives from Qantas and Virgin Airlines, said that cyber attacks were the second biggest risk to the aviation industry after natural disasters.
Ty Miller, of Australian security firm Pure Hacking, said the risk was no longer "something out of a movie" but had become more likely with the dawn of the Stuxnet virus.
An unknown attacker last year used the software to sabotage one of Iran's uranium enrichment plants.
"The stereotypical Die Hard 2 airport attack where aircraft controls can be taken over is no longer just a movie script - it's a reality," Mr Miller said.
The Stuxnet attack in Iran overwhelmed the nuclear facility's internal network, causing it to go offline.
"The same could occur with the aviation industry," Mr Miller said.
"The control of the aircraft themselves could be compromised.
"You could deal with planes so that when they're in the air they all of a sudden start dumping all their fuel, or force the planes to take a nosedive.
"And it's not necessarily one plane - it could be a whole fleet."
But Mr Miller said the likelihood of such an attack was low.
"The analysis of the Stuxnet attack showed that it would have required five or 10 people working for at least six months," he said.
Are airlines really so stupid as to allow for the controls of a plane to be in any way, shape or form connected to the public Internet? If this is not true, then there is little to no risk.
Another reason to bring back the Steam Passenger Trains.
And Zeppelins.
Flight software is loaded via a JTAG connection or an FPGA
downloader, and the binaries are CRC’d to protect against
substitution with malicious software. This happens at a
secure maintainence facility, not over the Internet, not with someone’s thumbdrive.
Fire off an EMP, and hundreds, if not thousands of planes will literally drop out of the sky (although the older ones will still have some level of control).
The 9/11 truthers will run with this as proof that it was the government that flew the planes into the WTC
Snips from another article, dated 10/19/10:
London: A new breed of cyber terrorists has the capability of breaking into a plane's sophisticated on-board computer systems and forcing it to crash, a security document released on Monday warned.
The cyber threat makes it possible for a potential hijacker to carry out his attack without boarding the plane.
Officials confirmed that these computer-generated assaults, which involve individuals creating software viruses or rogue computer programs and emails, could bring down passenger planes.
Perhaps in one of the new Microsoft planes - where a pilot is only a voting member - and the OS is, well, I DID use the name Microsoft.
“The defects go in before the name goes on.”
Kidding aside, no sane manufacturer would allow software to have complete contrul, and there should be NO system which does not have a pilot controlled manual override of any software systems.
If you think that the airplane software is free of bugs, you’ve never written a computah program!
Who needs hackers, when you have low level programming manager MBAs, artificial deadlines, and absurd specs!
This was discussed some months ago and, as I recall, the aircraft itself is never connected to the internet, but preflight, and flight planning is.
I don't undertand the details, but this seems like a really dumb lapse of common sense.
This trojan has been around a few years now.
Yeah, imagine a pilot of a Boeing 767 calling “James” on the support line in Bangalore, while experiencing software trouble in the air. You think it hasn’t happened? Last year when I was flying stateside from London the entertainment system went out and the pilots did have to call support lines for help. Where, they didn’t say, but since the system was not fixed during the 12 hour flight, Bangalore is strongly suspected.
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