Malware and Critical Infrastructure

"Computer viruses may have contributed to the Spanair passenger plane crash which killed 154 people in Madrid two years ago", reports the Spanish newspaper El Pais. "The Spanair central computer which registered technical problems in airplanes was not functioning properly because it had been contaminated by harmful computer programs", the magazine continues.We cannot confirm whether malware played a part, nor do we know which particular malware it could have been. However, over the years, we have seen real-world infrastructure affected by computer problems. In most cases, this has been just a side effect; the malware behind the problem wasn't trying to take systems down, it just did.This was especially bad in 2003, when we saw malware induced problems in real-life systems unprecedented in their severity. The main culprits were network worms Slammer and Blaster.The network congestion caused by Slammer dramatically slowed down the network traffic of the entire Internet. One of the world's largest automatic teller machine networks crashed and remained inoperative over the whole weekend. Many international airports reported that their air traffic control systems slowed down. Emergency phone systems were reported to have problems in different parts of the USA. The worm even managed to enter the internal network of the Davis-Besse nuclear (continue reading...)