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| -Lurid Crime Tales- |
| Malware contributed to Spanair crash 2 years ago |
| 2010-08-23 |
Malware may have been a contributory cause of a fatal Spanair crash that killed 154 people two years ago. Spanair flight number JK 5022 crashed with 172 on board moments after taking off from Madrid's Barajas Airport on a scheduled flight to Las Palmas on 20 August 2008. Just 18 survived the crash and subsequent fire aboard the McDonnell Douglas MD-82 aircraft. The airline's central computer which registered technical problems on planes was infected by Trojans at the time of the fatal crash and this resulted in a failure to raise an alarm over multiple problems with the plane, according to Spanish daily El Pais. |
| Posted by:newc |
| #7 Come on, didn't you guys ever see the movie "Airplane"? |
| Posted by: Texhooey 2010-08-23 22:40 |
| #6 From the article: The airline's central computer which registered technical problems on planes was infected by Trojans at the time of the fatal crash and this resulted in a failure to raise an alarm over multiple problems with the plane Meaning the computer used to track maintenance and performance issues on Spanair's aircraft was infected, not the computer on the aircraft that crashed. A poorly written or badly translated article. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2010-08-23 21:26 |
| #5 This might be crap journalism. I don't believe the airplane sensors inform the airline but doesn't inform the pilots... That would be a typical Soviet approach. |
| Posted by: Phosing Big Foot3926 2010-08-23 20:48 |
| #4 My question is who the hell programmed the central computer of the airliner with the same OS used for laptops, etc. An airplane running Windows? Really? That is a good way to "Blue Screen" an entire jetliner. I would NEVER trust an airliner running Microsoft Windows (or any other Microsoft product) as its central computer. Who the HELL put Microsoft software on an airliner? Whoever made that decision should be shot. |
| Posted by: crosspatch 2010-08-23 19:16 |
| #3 Another possibility could be COTS hardware that was compromised from the manufacturer (see Dell's recent admission that it shipped some of it's PowerEdge servers with compromised hardware.) |
| Posted by: djh_usmc 2010-08-23 19:15 |
| #2 So can the programmers be sought for prosecution on manslaughter charges? Unlikely, a lot of malware is scripts and other kinds of crud cobbled together. The mildest forms cause things like popups, while the more malicious have rootkits which install backdoors into a system, create remote procedure calls to broadcast continously over a net eating up bandwidth and even spam certain executables over and over again. Nonetheless I'd be asking how the heck the malware got ONTO the central computer. My bet is a maintenance laptop was already infected and when checking the main computer in turn infected it. |
| Posted by: Valentine 2010-08-23 17:57 |
| #1 So can the programmers be sought for prosecution on manslaughter charges? Can all malware authors whose programmes could jeopardise aircraft safety systems be charged with soemthing like reckless endangerment? |
| Posted by: Bulldog 2010-08-23 17:20 |