Saturday, November 27, 2010

The complexity and cleverness of the Stuxnet worm are now coming to light.

These include the revelation that it hid itself from monitoring systems, so that as it slowly destroyed the Iranian nuclear program, the control software couldn't identify what was going wrong. The Iranians ran diagnostics that the worm fooled into reporting that all systems were running properly, even as one centrifuge after another suffered damage.

Further, the worm reported back to to two servers, one in Denmark and one in Malaysia. However, no one can now find these servers.

Once the Belarussian company discovered the worm, it naturally posted on a security website about what it had found, asking for help identifying the worm. Almost instantly, this was discovered by the worm, and access to the security site in question was denied for twenty four hours, allowing the worm that much time to erase it's tracks.

Although the worm has infected over 100,000 computers worldwide, it has damaged only those involved in the Iranian nuclear program.

The complexity of this is unprecedented, and no hacker could possibly have done it. It is a military weapon.

However, to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program so that military action is not needed is grounds to award whatever group or organization that did this the Nobel Peace Prize. The lives saved, both Iranian and other wise, are very significant.

No comments:

Post a Comment