Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • August 20, 2010 6:35 PM

When working in the oil industry I saw (what I was told where) cuttle fish “fly out” of the water over a shortish distance. I was told by a trawlerman who worked on the supply vessel I was on that it indicated there where large prey in the water and by “jumping out” they could confuse the attacker.

So if cuttle fish can do it why not their bigger cousins?

Also in the news recently was a photo of quite large rays gliding, they kind of reminded me of the Vulcan bomber doing a low level pass at sea.

Clive Robinson • August 22, 2010 3:09 AM

@ Bruce,

OFF Topic

“… flight 5022 Crashed by Malware”

Is from the title of this

http://www.autoevolution.com/news/spanair-flight-5022-crashed-by-malware-23643.html

and several other articals.

On the second anniversary of the crash of Spanair flight 5022 there are reports that the accident investigators belive computer malware (specificaly a Trojan Horse) found on one of the avionics systems was a contributor to the crash.

The usual APT suspects have lept on it as a critical infrastructure “cyber attack”.

However I’m somewhat puzzeld, the aircraft (an MacDonald Douglas MD-80) is not a Fly By Wire (FBW) aircraft.

The physical cause of the crash appears to have been to it taking of with the flaps retracted, thus insufficient lift for safe flight at the low take of speed, the consequence was it stalled and had insufficient time/ hight for a recovery.

The malware was found in a computer that was responsable for monitoring avionics and attendent warning systems. As far as I can tell it was NOT in any way in control of any part of the aircraft flight surfaces etc.

What is being said is somewhat “lost in translation” but the sequence of events appear to be,

1, Pilot did not deploy flaps prior to take off.
2, The simple electrical system to detect this and / or the attendant primary warning system to alert
the pilot had no power.
3, The “infected” computer should have detected this fault.
4, The “infected” computer failed to warn pilot of fault in warning system.
5, The failure of detection or warning by the computer was caused by the infection.
6, This failure had been seen on atleast three previous occasions with this aircraft.

As far as I can tell the actual failure was “the nut behind the wheel” known as the pilot who failed to make the correct take off checks of cockpit controls not the fact that a secondary warning system had a malware infection.

I don’t buy the argument that a failure of such a warning system Was to blaim a pilot should be proactive in the use of basic flight drills not reactively reliant on warning systems to corect basic behaviour faults. As a comenter on a pilots blog put it?

There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but no old bold pilots….

Sadly we see this sort of human behaviour all to often in the InfoSec field, as well as the politicaly minded agender pushers misrepresenting events tragic or not to improve their status as cyber guardians in their chicken little existance.