Posts Tagged ‘Stuxnet Worm’

Symantic’s Extensive Analysis of the Stuxnet Worm

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

Available here.

My hacking skills are pretty much limited to writing “Hello World” in Python on a good day, but even a cursory glance shows that Stuxnet is a very sophisticated beast indeed. Let’s hope it delivered a critical blow to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The Stuxnet Worm: Set Pants to Brown Alert

Sunday, October 3rd, 2010

The Weekly Standard has an interesting piece on The Stuxnet worm. It seems designed to attack Iran’s nuclear program, was in the wild for more than six months before being detected, featured stolen digital signature keys (which may have involved actual physical espionage) and used an off-the charts four zero-day exploits, which is pretty much unheard of.

We really, really better hope that we or the Israelis wrote this thing, because if not, there’s a team of scary-good black hat hackers out there (from the description of how large and sophisticated it is, and all the different things it does, makes me think it took at least ten really good hackers more than a year to create) that can physically destroy major infrastructure targets through code almost at will. You really, really don’t want a team of “non-state actors” to have those capabilities…

I suspect we’re getting a glimpse of what the opening rounds of the next major war will look like…