The Spanair plane crash that killed 154 people two years ago on Friday may have been partly caused by malware, according to reports.
The newspaper El Pais reported on Friday that Spanair's mainframe was contaminated with Trojans at the time that Flight JK 5022 to Gran Canaria crashed just after take-off at Madrid's Barajas airport.
The mainframe was supposed to raise the alarm when three similar technical problems were noted, but did not do so due to the infestation, El Pais said.
According to the report, investigating judge Juan David Perez has ordered Spanair to turn over the relevant data. There are currently two defendants in the case, both Spanair technicians.
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Do we know what OS was running? Another case of wonderful MS software in action...?
The article says "Spanair's mainframe". Since when does M$ make an O/S for mainframes? (It could be running Windows in a virtual machine, however.) The vast majority of mainframes are IBM, but in Europe, it could be something like Unisys or Fujitsu, or maybe Siemens.
Firstly, the article writer may no actually know what a mainframe is, and might just be referring to "that big thing that controls everything".
Secondly, I sincerely hope it wasn't Siemens - their software is a bad joke - hardwired passwords anyone?
Where does the original article say anything about a mainframe? The last I checked "ordenador central" translates to "central computer." Spanair has about 30 aircraft in service, and I'm sure that any reasonable x86 server could serve quite well as a 'central computer' for such a company.
One such server was, about a week aftert the Spanair crash, central to an incident here in the US. Microsoft won a bid to replace the FAA's flight planning network. One node, in Atlanta crashed and was restored. When it crashed the second time its load was transferred to a redundant system, which strained under its load plus Atlanta's, and it went down. The rest of the net went down like dominos and flight planning across the whole of the US was down.
(NYSE went for Linux servers and has never hiccuped)
MS's role in the Spanair tragedy was significant, but not central. According to the original article, the plane crashed because the flaps had not been set to their take-off configuration. There is a warning alarm that is supposed to warn the pilot of this, but it failed. Two failures had occurred the previous day and the ground crew discovered another just prior to the fateful take-off attempt (three failures was supposed to raise red flags triggering more in-depth inspection). However, when the maintenance staff attempted to consult the maintenance logs, 'the monitor was contaminated with trojans.' They did not know of the earlier faults and consequently did not ground the plane -- and nearly 160 people died.
-- GKP
I too would be interested to know if it was any fault of Microsoft. The other post by GKP regarding the FAA is scary to say the least. If I was flying and I knew Microsoft software was in control of any part of the flight, I would be very nervous. I really hope that they would be smart enough to use an OS that is known to be more stable, like Unix or Linux. I have read quite a bit that Linux is commonly used for air traffic controllers, which is a good thing.
It's very scary to think that a Trojan could of caused the plane crash
Why is no one blaming the correct person here? The SysAd is at fault for failing to protect their system correctly. Additionally, why was there no firewall in place to protect the system?
Unless this was imbedded malware in the firmware it should never have affected the system.
TJR: The Sys Admin is partially at fault, however if they were running Windows there is only so much you can do, and even that is not a guarantee to protect from malware. Frankly, using Windows is a huge security risk and users should be aware of that. Today I still see Windows become infected on corporate desktops, while they run Symantec Antivirus, Websense web filtering, and without administrator rights. Viruses and malware still get through holes in Internet Explorer and Adobe Reader, and install themselves on the PCs. I dumped Windows on my personal PCs and migrated to Linux, and I've been doing the same for relatives and close friends as well. So far the results have been astounding, no more worries about system stability, malware, and the flawed Windows OS.
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You all seem to be forgetting one thing whoever written the malware is to blame for all this, yes if other's had kept a sharper eye on the ball then this might well have being prevented, but neither MS nor the technicians working for the company set about to cause this.
Malware is exactly as programmed malicious.