I spotted a brilliantly quirky story in The Times yesterday, all about alien intruders on the International Space Station (ISS).

Luckily however the ‘monsters’ were just low-risk computer worms that had been transferred onto two of the astronauts’ laptops when back on Earth.

It’s quite telling, just how easy it is for computers to become infected with viruses even in the loneliest reaches of Space. It scares me to think just how hard it must be to keep a PC clean when it’s constantly interfacing with different bits of hardware and subject to thousands of downloaded files every month. 

Apparently neither of the laptops has any interaction with the main controls in the Space Station so we don’t have to worry about the ISS crashing into Earth from 217 miles up just yet. Although, if NASA with its billions of funding can’t keep it’s computers clean, what chance do we stand? I had better go and renew my Symantec subscription….