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Agreed, but it was still quite disingenuous of them to say that Linux was the specific reason they were open to infection. The fact that the space station has c
by TallGuyShort 13y ago
Agreed, but it was still quite disingenuous of them to say that Linux was the specific reason they were open to infection. The fact that the space station has computers and ways to connect to those computers means there's a chance of infection.
- freehunter 13y agoViruses are harder to implement on custom software, though. Perhaps the ISS should have used a custom OS to protect against malware? Popular off-the-shelf software is going to be targeted before an in-house and not-publicly-documented piece of software.
- hrkristian 13y agoBuilding an OS from the ground up would take a lot of money and manpower, and NASA aren't exactly rolling in cash nowadays. And while yes, in-house software would be safe against most existing malware, and general malware, ISS would not be safe from direct attacks. Those are the real threat anyway...
- freehunter 13y agoVxWorks is pretty popular with space agencies (NASA uses it, as well as SpaceX. Curiosity and Dragon both run VxWorks RTOS). It has a 64-bit mode for Intel processors, runs on HRFS, DOSFS, and NFS, has IPv6 built in, and is POSIX compliant. While direct attacks are a real threat, I don't see anywhere saying this was a direct attack. Not using an off-the-shelf OS could have mitigated the attack if it wasn't a direct attack.