UPDATE: as reported by Fox News, Iran has captured a live, operational U.S. drone. How did they do it? With a virus, of course. We warned you about this a couple months ago. You read it here on October 22, 2011. You’ll listen to us next time!

(Originally published at ClassifiedInformation on October 22, 2011)

Recent news reports show that the government’s problem with viruses and computer security permeate the military all the way into the famous drone program used to terminate live targets around the world. They know for a fact that the virus infecting the drones has accessed classified information, but they have failed to find ways to eradicate the threat.

“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

The news is the latest that calls into question the cozy relationship between hackers and the U.S. Government.

A not-so-good feeling

The infection the Air Force drone program faces seems more severe than what private individuals face. Sure, keyloggers compromise bank account numbers, passwords and private information every day. Still, the average computer user does not use keystrokes to obliterate U.S. citizens in the wilderness of Yemen, or various foreign entities in Libya, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and wherever else the Obama regime decides to kill people.

secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.

The problem is worse than simple classified information being leaked to terrorists. Those in possession of the cockpit keystrokes now know how to fly our drones.

Ho-hum… Nothing to worry about

In light of the virus threat, no one seems too worried about it. The lackadaisical attitude of the staffers at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada where the drone pilots work is amazing.

“It’s getting a lot of attention,” the source says. “But no one’s panicking. Yet.”

Why would anyone panic? We already have terrorists watching live video from US drones. Now these drones have viruses that send keystrokes to the terrorists. This means the terrorists know how to fly them. That means terrorists could hijack drones and use them to attack us. How could a military officer discourage panic under these circumstances?

 A lack of resources?

Most people dealing with an infected personal computer would probably visit the website of an antivirus provider for help removing their virus. Did you know the the U.S. Air Force does it the same way?

At first, they followed removal instructions posted on the website of the Kaspersky security firm.

Here we probably have billions of dollars invested in a state-of-the-art assassination system and the solution to a security breach is a visit to the Kaspersky  help pages?

Let’s hope this is disinformation

Seeing that the military seems unconcerned about the vulnerability of the drone program, we can only hope the news is fake. News from Wired that terrorists (and presumably, China) can see drone video in real time and pilot drones from remote keyboards should concern every one of us. It probably will after rogue forces use our own drones against us… if we we ever found out about it.