Earlier last week it was reported that the military’s Predator and Reaper UAV fleet was hit by a virus that logged the pilots keystrokes. After several attempts to remove it, the virus kept coming back to the system’s.
Security researcher Miles Fidelman says, however, the virus may be an internal Department of Defense (DoD) security monitoring package. He noted there are “a couple of vendors” who sell such technology to the DoD, which are “essentially rootkits that do, among other things, key logging.” The comments were sent to the Dailydave security mailing list, which was posted through SecLists.org.
“I kind of wonder if the virus that folks are fighting is something that some other part of DoD deployed intentionally,” Fidelman adds.
It would be quite glaring if the Air Force’s tech’s are wasting there time fighting this virus if it was employed by the DoD itself as accountability on its pilots.
Source: http://techzwn.com/2011/10/predator-drone-virus-could-be-internal-monitoring-system-analyst/
RIT Cyber Security Policy and Law Class Blog 
It’s interesting to see that the government is utilizing the same kind of tools and exploits that hackers use, and in light of things they’ve done in the past I’m hesitant to say that the government is using them legally. Recently a German government rootkit was discovered and was shown to allow further surveillance in violation of laws. More info here:
http://ccc.de/en/updates/2011/staatstrojaner
Even if it was the DoD deploying it for accountability, what if there was a way to change the destination of the information? Then the power is taken out of our hands and now there is someone else that can completely monitor our predator drones. The virus is a danger to that equipment.