Noah Shachtman
A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and
Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly
missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.
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.”
Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus
and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or
by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to
make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know
exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the
infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech.
That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been
captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet
to someone outside the military chain of command.
Drones have become America’s tool of choice in both its conventional
and shadow wars, allowing U.S. forces to attack targets and spy on its
foes without risking American lives. Since President Obama assumed
office, a fleet of approximately 30 CIA-directed drones have hit targets
in Pakistan more than 230 times; all told, these drones have killed more than 2,000 suspected militants and civilians, according to the Washington Post.
More than 150 additional Predator and Reaper drones, under U.S. Air
Force control, watch over the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. American
military drones struck 92 times in Libya between mid-April and late August. And late last month, an American drone killed top terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki — part of an escalating unmanned air assault in the Horn of Africa and southern Arabian peninsula.
But despite their widespread use, the drone systems are known to have
security flaws. Many Reapers and Predators don’t encrypt the video they
transmit to American troops on the ground. In the summer of 2009, U.S.
forces discovered “days and days and hours and hours” of the drone footage on the laptops of Iraqi insurgents. A $26 piece of software allowed the militants to capture the video.
The lion’s share of U.S. drone missions are flown by Air Force pilots stationed at Creech,
a tiny outpost in the barren Nevada desert, 20 miles north of a state
prison and adjacent to a one-story casino. In a nondescript building,
down a largely unmarked hallway, is a series of rooms, each with a rack
of servers and a “ground control station,” or GCS. There, a drone pilot
and a sensor operator sit in their flight suits in front of a series of
screens. In the pilot’s hand is the joystick, guiding the drone as it
soars above Afghanistan, Iraq, or some other battlefield.
Some of the GCSs are classified secret, and used for conventional
warzone surveillance duty. The GCSs handling more exotic operations are
top secret. None of the remote cockpits are supposed to be connected to
the public internet. Which means they are supposed to be largely immune
to viruses and other network security threats.
But time and time again, the so-called “air gaps” between classified
and public networks have been bridged, largely through the use of discs
and removable drives. In late 2008, for example, the drives helped introduce the agent.btz worm to hundreds of thousands of Defense Department computers. The Pentagon is still disinfecting machines, three years later.
Use of the drives is now severely restricted throughout the military.
But the base at Creech was one of the exceptions, until the virus hit.
Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates
and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is
believed to have spread through these removable drives. Drone units at
other Air Force bases worldwide have now been ordered to stop their use.
In the meantime, technicians at Creech are trying to get the virus
off the GCS machines. It has not been easy. At first, they followed
removal instructions posted on the website of the Kaspersky security
firm. “But the virus kept coming back,” a source familiar with the
infection says. Eventually, the technicians had to use a software tool
called BCWipe to completely erase the GCS’ internal hard drives. “That meant rebuilding them from scratch” — a time-consuming effort.
The Air Force declined to comment directly on the virus. “We
generally do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, or
responses to our computer networks, since that helps people looking to
exploit or attack our systems to refine their approach,” says Lt. Col.
Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for Air Combat Command, which oversees the
drones and all other Air Force tactical aircraft. “We invest a lot in
protecting and monitoring our systems to counter threats and ensure
security, which includes a comprehensive response to viruses, worms, and
other malware we discover.”
However, insiders say that senior officers at Creech are being briefed daily on the virus. “It’s getting a lot of attention,” the source says. “But no one’s panicking. Yet.”
Photo courtesy of Bryan William Jones
