User Rating: 0 / 5

Viruses! In! Space!

(Original Article: http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/103826 Original Article Date: Wed Aug 27, 2008 2:21PM EDT)

No one is safe from the scourge of computer malware: NASA says that laptops taken to the International Space Station last month were infected with the Gammima.AG virus. The virus was discovered in the wild on earth a year ago, but this is its first known trip into the cosmos.

Gammima is a Windows virus designed to steal login names and passwords for online games, so there's not a real risk that the virus will send the space station tumbling to earth. (Most of those programs run on other operating systems; the laptops are used for email and to run a nutritional program.) However, astronauts' World of Warcraft experiences are going to be severely curtailed by the news.

Removal is a fairly simple matter (these laptops had no anti-virus protection loaded onto them), but NASA still doesn't know how the virus got on the laptops in the first place. One theory is that an astronaut took a flash drive infected with the virus along for the ride into space. (Gammima primarily replicates by copying itself to removable media.)

Curiously, NASA notes that this isn't the first viral incursion in orbit, but stresses that never has a mission been at risk because of space-borne malware.

Still, the lesson is an obvious one: If a virus can sneak past NASA, it can easily sneak past you, too. Protect your system with a security package today.