Aeroplanes & German Nuclear Plant Infected With Viruses

Christoph Steitz & Eric Auchard:

A nuclear power plant in Germany has been found to be infected with computer viruses, but they appear not to have posed a threat to the facility’s operations because it is isolated from the Internet, the station’s operator said on Tuesday.

Lucky break. Otherwise we’d ‘just’ have a nuclear disaster on our hands.

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for Finland-based F-Secure, said that infections of critical infrastructure were surprisingly common, but that they were generally not dangerous unless the plant had been targeted specifically.

I guess we’d find out if a particular plant had been targeted or not after the fact, and after a potential disaster. Seems like a good way to go about security. Right?

As an example, Hypponen said he had recently spoken to a European aircraft maker that said it cleans the cockpits of its planes every week of malware designed for Android phones. The malware spread to the planes only because factory employees were charging their phones with the USB port in the cockpit.

Seriously? How the fuck is this even possible? Fortunately…

Because the plane runs a different operating system, nothing would befall it.

Unless the malware was written to target that OS.