Under-reported story of the week? Perhaps.
It seems the hacker group Anonymous has its eyes on Facebook and Wall Street, so I wouldn’t pin this on them. Add that to the fact that they love to get credit for their “anonymous” efforts and this hardly looks like their handiwork. Rogue regime? Enemy state? Just some bad programming? Either way, this is pretty friggin scary.
The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”
