Stuxnet

Andrew's earlier post that mentioned the current state of Iran's nuclear program reminded me of a few articles I read recently about one of the wildest things I have ever heard. Around mid-2009 programmers everywhere began discovering a computer worm that had infected industrial programs around the world. The worm was initially found in all kinds of places, with the only common thread being that it infected solely software made by the company Siemens, but after close examination it was determined that the purpose of the worm was to mess with the centrifuges at nuclear facilities.
It soon became clear that this worm, now being called Stuxnet, was meant as a direct attack on Iran's nuclear program when roughly 1/5 of Iran's nuclear centrifuges were destroyed. The virus works in a truly ingenious fashion, not only does it speed up the centrifuges that are responsible for enriching low quality uranium into weapons grade material until they are over-full with gas and explode, bust at the same time it sends false information to the monitoring centers at a plant that makes it seem like everything is normal and running just as it should be. Especially hard-hit was the Iranian nuclear facility Natanz, where over 1000 of their centrifuges exploded, causing the plant to shut down for over a year.
The origin of the worm is still technically unknown but there are strong clues that it was developed as a joint U.S.-Israeli effort to prevent or at least hinder Tehran's development of a nuclear weapon. For starters, in 2008 the U.S. government formed a partnership with many software manufacturers, including Siemens, to look for and fix potential cybervulnerabilities in their systems. This gave the government the opportunity to closely examine Siemens products, including the specific SCADA systems that were later targeted by the worm, as well as to identify several well-hidden holes in the software that the worm exploited. Then, earlier this year it was discovered that the Israelis had built a model facility that spun centrifuges identical to those in iran deep underground at the Dimona nuclear complex in the Negev Desert. This facility is said to have been the testing ground for the Stuxnet worm, to make sure it would work as plan once released.
Soon after the Stuxnet attacks began Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the head of Israel's Mossad announced separately that they believed that Iran's efforts to achieve nuclear arms capabilities had been set back by as much as five years, although Clinton cited increased U.S. sanctions and international pressure as the cause. Those estimates were amended to a one to two year set back and just recently, Iran seems to have finally overcome the damage caused by Stuxnet by developing a new generation of centrifuges that are both safer and faster.
I found all this information about the computer worm extremely interesting and it just shows the huge role cyber warfare currently has and will continue to have in global conflicts. That a crippling blow to an entire country's nuclear efforts was dealt with just an e-mail or USB drive is amazing.