Stuxnet: Cyberwar Revolution in Military Affairs

On June 17th, 2010, security researchers at a small Belarusian firm known as VirusBlockAda identified malicious software malware that infected USB memory sticks.1 In the months that followed, there was a flurry of activity in the computer security community - revealing that this discovery identified only one component of a new computer worm2 known as Stuxnet. This software was designed to specifically target industrial equipment. Once it was revealed that the majority of infections were discovered in Iran,3 along with an unexplained decommissioning of centrifuges at the Iranian fuel enrichment plant FEP at Natanz,4 many in the media speculated that the ultimate goal of Stuxnet was to target Iranian nuclear facilities. In November of 2010, some of these suspicions were validated when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad publically acknowledged that a computer worm created problems for a limited number of our nuclear centrifuges. 5 Reputable experts in the computer security community have already labeled Stuxnet as unprecedented,6 an evolutionary leap,7 and the type of threat we hope to never see again.8