This story is now rapidly spreading across the internet. Most, if not all, state the El Pais newspaper as their source. Turns out that the original El País
article does not make the assumptions nor draw the conclusions others which refer to it do.
From the TechNewsDaily article quoted by
p51guy:
"An internal report issued by the airline revealed the infected computer failed to detect three technical problems with the aircraft, which if detected, may have prevented the plane from taking off, according to reports in the Spanish newspaper, El Pais."
That is not what the original article said. No where near it in fact. For the computer system to detect three technical problems and raise an alarm, it would first have to be aware there had been 2 previous incidents. It was not because Spanair had the bad habit of registering incidents 24 hours later, as the El País newspaper does state.
In fact, as El Pais states, it was when the technicians tried to report the latest incident, they found they could not do so because of the malware. At this time, as El Pais stresses, the plane had already crashed.
I've seen this "Malware caused plane to crash" news-item rapidly evolve over the past 24 hours. Another perfect example of how 'journalists' appear to drop all their journalistic integrity (should they have any) the moment they need to address an issue they do not understand). As far as I have been able to find out, most if not all of the confusion regarding the original El País article is based on a (very bad) Google Translation. Some newspapers, like dutch De Telegraaf (most read in Holland) even claim the plane's boardcomputer was infected!
Bottom line: don't use Google Translate!