>>4
Well, they had
decades to work on it with the nation's top scientists... it's not THAT farfetched, especially if the system has gone through potentially centuries of lax security (the aliens only target races that didn't even come close in terms of technological development).
It's entirely possible that a hive-minded alien race, having gone centuries without a real threat, would do something as stupid as allowing remote code execution from a docked spacecraft.