[IP] Malware kills 154

[Steven Bellovin]

With his permission, here is a summary of the Spanish-language article by Ivan Arce, a native speaker of Spanish.  (I misspoke when I said he read the actual report.)  Note the lack of any assertion of causality between the crash and the malware.

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- The malware-infected computer was located at the HQs in Palma de
Mallorca. The plane crashed on take off from Madrid.
- The fact that the computer was infected was revealed in an internal
memo on the same day of the incident.
- The computer hosted the application used to log maintaince failure
reports. It was configured to trigger on on-screen alarm (maybe a dialog
with an "OK" button?) when it detected 3 failures of a similar kind on
the same plane
- Spainair  was known to take up to 24hs to update the system with
maintaince reports as admitted by two mechanics (I dont know the proper
english term for this) from the maint. team.
- This isn't a minor issue given that the same plane had two failures on
the prior day and another failure on the same day. The maintaince crew
was responsible for reporting failures immediately when they were
discovered.
- That last failure on the same day, had prompted the pilots to abort
the take off at the head of the runway and get back to the gate when an
overheated valve was detected.
- Then the pilots forgot to activate flaps and slats.
- The plane had an onboard audible alarm to signal that condition, the
alarm did not go off.

Reading this full account is quite saddening.

So, in sum, it seems that a set of failures and errors were combined and
led to terrible consequences. In this overall picture, malware had a
very limited and small impact.

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