Andre Yoskowitz
8 Oct 2011 15:25
Although unconfirmed by the military, it appears that the computers used to control Reaper and Predator drones have been hit by a nasty keylogger.
The drone control facility, located at Nevada's Creech Air Force Base, controls the unmanned flights on missions into Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other nations.
Because of the nature of the missions, computers at the base are not allowed to be connected to the Internet, in an effort to block hacking or the infection of malware. The Creech base, however, is one of few permitted to use USB flash drives to transfer mission data between computers.
It is this special permission that seems to have allowed the computers to become infected.
For now, the keylogger has not cause any issues (as all it does is record keystrokes) but the base is having issues removing it from the system. Flights are still being manned remotely, day in and day out.