Virus sinks Royal Navy fleet comms

By Davey Winder
Friday, 16 January 2009 19:50

Your IT - Home IT

Sir William Blackstone famously said the Royal Navy was something along the lines of being England's "ancient and natural strength; the floating bulwark of the island." But then there weren't many computer viruses around in the 18th century.

NASA has had worms in space and some Trojans have even managed to infiltrate the odd GPS SatNav unit before now.

However, the Ministry of Defence in the UK is more used to dealing with UFO reports than military malware it has to be said.

Which is why reports of a virus infiltrating the comms network of pretty much the entire Royal Navy fleet has come as such a surprise.

The Ministry of Defence has confirmed that, while no weaponry systems or navigational networks were impacted by the virus, other IT systems had been hit.

It declined to admit if reports of some 75 percent of Royal Navy systems being affected were accurate, but did not deny this either.

According to security expert Graham Cluley the incident was unlikely to be malicious, hacker related or down to some hostile power.

"It’s more likely that a human error or lapse in security accidentally let a virus or worm spread across the systems" Cluley reckons. A position that the MoD has confirmed.

Still, you might have expected an organisation tasked with defending the shores of the United Kingdom to be able to defend its own network boundaries with a little more success.

Had the virus been of a more malicious nature, who knows what might have happened.

Meanwhile the MoD insists that just such a network defence solution has been "tested and implemented" and the majority of systems are now "working normally."