Yikes, a guilded cyber "missile"!!

Now, this is spooky to the Nth degree! A malware program designed to sabotage a physical entity functioning as a guided cyber missile.


Goto:

Stuxnet malware is 'weapon' out to destroy ... Iran's Bushehr nuclear plant? - Yahoo! News

 

Read that piece earlier today. Scary indeed.

Though I wouldn't say suprising, at all. And, I'd imagine this is only the tip of the iceberg. Everything is digital these days, everything is tied in. Plus, more and more emphasis on being able to do things remotely- wether you're talking about operating large scale things from remote locations or turning on your house lights with your iPhone. Those trends seem to make things generally more vulnerable to this kind of attack.

And... the hackers are always two steps ahead of the people trying to stop them.

 

I think Iran is under attack already. Stuxnet is an amazing piece of work. Combined with a couple key scientist's biting the dust, Iran's nuke program may have been derailed for a while. What stuxnet can do is sooo brilliant. I wonder which nations combined massive amounts of brain power to wage a cyberwar where there aren't a lot of casualties on the receiving end.

 

There will be an in depth article on the STUXNET worm in tomorrows NYT. I'll bet that would be an interesting read.

 

Read some in depth analisys of the thing, after all it's my job. The short version is I really don't want having to stop anyone with that sort of skill/capability.

Considering the target systems were NOT connected to the internet or any other pubblic network the fact they still managed to reach them is really scary. And if the targets, or some other group, decide to retaliate in kind it could get really nasty, that sort of attack can be created by a small team of very good programmers, you can probably recruit one in any university for a cost well below that of any conventional weapon development and possibly within reach of a lot of well funded "baddies", my estimate is that no more than 30 man years went into that code, in addition to the reverse engineering of the target systems, a definite jump up from the usual malware but still pretty cheap.

The biggest limitation of STUXNET is that to get through the "air gap" between the targets and the internet the code couldn't be "fire & forget", like most worms, but required a feedback and upgrade mechanism that makes it much more vulnerable to detection, but it's a small consolation, that attack team was a couple of notches above most IT security people I know and, as the attackers, they only need to get lucky once.

 

Here is the article. Surprised that they would leak that Siemans had a part in it's creation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html?pagewanted=1

TOS, I read where Stuxnet was introduced to Iran's facility by the scientists who work there using thumb drives to take work home. The worm entered from their home computers and then taken back to work. Not sure if that's true, but it sounds right.

 

That link is probably the same as this one, but yours wouldn't open up here. I'll try mine and see if it works.

Goto:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html?_r=1

 

That link is probably the same as this one, but yours wouldn't open up here. I'll try mine and see if it works.

Goto:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html?_r=1

Nope, mine doesn't work either. I guess the best thing to recommend is to just goto the New York Times homepage and read it there.

 

Thanks BD. I hope people read it. Seems like the door is open for unrestricted cyber warfare. You'd think that some of our systems are vulnerable and now we may come under some kind of attack on banking etc.

 

I read it. Quite interesting. I suspect a lot of the success (if true) of the worm was due to some Iranian scientists or technicians working with the west for one reason or another. All it takes is one person with a grudge.

 

With a new generation comes a new battlefield. First was sticks and rocks in a clearing. Next was knights, samurai, and anything along those lines in wide open areas. When humanity learned to sail, war took to the high seas. When machine guns came, so did the trenches in WWI. When the Wrights took to the air for the first time, the air was the new battlefield, especially in WWII. With everyone having knowledge of the internet today, it will eventually host the first and hopefully the only full scale cyber war.