US Air Force migrates to Linux due to virus

<° Linux it is not used to doing complete copy / paste of articles on other sites, we try to bring them news / articles that are more personal, that have a "touch" of ours.

However since LinuxZone.com I read a piece of news that, to be honest, is very well written. Elijah Hidalgo He is the one who wrote it, and well I would like to share it with you:

The US Air Force migrates to GNU / Linux due to a virus

Responsible for the Nevada Air Forces, have recognized that in September of last year that the ground control systems of the base, suffered various problems, affecting a plane Unmanned military (Reaper), which crashed due to an infection caused by a virus in its system. Although at first they denied this possibility arguing that a virus of this type did not represent any threat to the operation of this type of aircraft, internally this intrusion has been treated as something very serious.

"The ground system is independent of the flight control system used by the Air Forces to control the planes remotely, the ability of the pilots to safely fly these planes was maintained throughout the incident"they said at the time.

“The malware in question is a credential stealer, commonly found on computer networks and considered more of a nuisance than an operational threat. It is not designed to transmit data or video, nor to damage files or programs on the infected computer "

Be that as it may, the discovery of this virus has been an embarrassing trance for the US Air Force, which has seen how easily malicious code can be inserted into its Windows XP-based systems.
According to some specialized media, the cause of this infection could be due to the use of external storage devices, something that the army itself corroborates when ordering not to use this type of device to avoid further problems.
Security researcher Mikko Hypponen also adds that some ground computers are already being migrated to a GNU / Linux system to avoid this type of problem, as we can see in this screenshot:

He also specified:

"If I had to choose between Windows XP and a Linux-based system, for a military operating system, I have no doubt that I would take the second option."

And here the article ends.

Undoubtedly when we talk about security and stability, I would never think of Windows ... BSD systems, Linux always come to mind, but never Windows.

regards

Sources of the news: LinuxZone.com (ESP) - DefenseNews (ENG)