I have blogged about the Stuxnet worm, a computer program that infiltrated the computers controlling the Iranian centrifuges that are being used to enrich uranium. The Stuxnet worm that was revealed in 2010 allowed the centrifuges to spin faster than they should and caused them to break down. It has recently been revealed that the Stuxnet that is well known is not the first such worm released to infect the Iranian control systems.
It turns out that there was another variant of the Stuxnet worm that has been in the Iranian computers since at least 2007. This variant also targeted the centrifuges but used a different mechanism. It blocked the outflow of gas from the centrifuges which eventually damaged them although it took time for the damage to become critical. The whole idea of this worm was to cause damage that would be difficult to trace. It also intercepted information coming from the centrifuges so that operators would not know about the problem until it was too late.
It is not known why the people that created the earlier version of the Stuxnet decided to release a more immediate and less subtle version of the worm into the Iranian control computers. It is possible that as the Iranians kept fixing and expanding their pool of centrifuges, the Stuxnet authors abandoned stealth in favor of speed with respect to damaging the Iranian centrifuges.
Many people believe that the United States and Israel designed the Stuxnet worms and released them to prevent Iran from enriching uranium for nuclear weapons. Neither the U.S. or Israel has officially admitted designing the Stuxnet worms. One thing is certain. The Stuxnet worms have proven that cyber weapons are an inexpensive alternative to full scale military assaults. The governments of major industrial nations are running cyberwar simulations to identify weak spots in national infrastructures that might be susceptible to cyber attack such as power plants, electrical grids, and telecom systems.
However sophisticated the cyber weapons are, they still have problems with collateral damage. The Stuxnet worm has been found in Russian nuclear power plants and even on the International Space Station. Fortunately, Stuxnet is very specifically targeted to damage centrifuges run by a specific type of control computer so it is not dangerous to other types of systems. The effect of the Stuxnet is confined to damaging centrifuges but it does not endanger other equipment, buildings or people. Future cyber weapons might not be so considerate. They can be designed to cause catastrophic failure in major infrastructure that could result in major damage and loss of life. As the Russian power plant example demonstrates, there is the same problem that conventional weapons may have with respect to being able to identify and separate friendly systems from enemy systems. And there is always the possibility of accidental mutation or deliberate alteration by hostile parties that may make a computer worm or virus much more dangerous that originally intended. We live in a world run by computers and cyber attacks could ultimately bring down our civilization, intentionally or unintentionally.
