● 08.24.10
●● What Spanair Crash and BP Disaster Have in Common: Microsoft Windows in Alarm Systems
Posted in Microsoft, Security, Windows at 1:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The alarm system mentioned in yesterday’s post almost definitely ran Windows, just like the one which failed BP and helped cause the Deepwater Horizon disaster
YESTERDAY we wrote about the Spanair disaster, noting that it was almost certainly Windows’ fault. The alarm system did not work, so it had nothing to do with heavy workloads. Based on this new article which we found, it seems like the alerting software used Windows as an underlying platform, so no wonder it got knocked down by malware. In many ways, this is similar to what happened to BP some months ago. The alarm system, which was intended to prevent such major disasters that end up killing animals, people, and leaking over a million barrels of oil into the ocean, was a Windows-only application and it went into blue screens of death [1, 2, 3, 4].
According to today’s news, “Hacking toolkit publishes DLL hijacking exploit” [via]
The appearance Monday of exploit code for the DLL loading issue that reportedly affects hundreds of Windows applications means hackers will probably start hammering on PCs shortly, security experts argued.“Once it makes it into Metasploit, it doesn’t take much more to execute an attack,” said Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle Security. “The hard part has already been done for [hackers].”
How long will it take for all alarm systems to abandon Microsoft Windows? Those who put Windows on such mission-critical systems should probably be prosecuted, if not for manslaughter then for willful negligence that caused many deaths. It’s not as though Microsoft’s poor security record is unknown, despite Microsoft hiding the full extent of this problem. █
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