Inside Stuxnet
Written by Andrew Johnson   
Sunday, 11 March 2012

Ralph Langner has analyzed the Stuxnet virus and made a convincing argument that it was created to do a single job. The technical details are really interesting and not the sort of thing you will encounter in the usual news media.

 

stuxnetdeepdive

 

The conclusion is that Stuxnet was designed to attack the Natanz processing facility in Iran. There is no clue as to who created the code, however. One interesting observation is that there seems to be no way to create Stuxnet without a test facility, i.e. you need substantial resources to create such a virus.

 

If you would like to see a less technical but wider discussion of security for SCADA systems, here's one that appeared recently on 60 Minutes.

Computer virus's evident success in damaging Iran's nuclear facility has officials asking if our own infrastructure is safe. Steve Kroft reports.

 

 

 

 

It is sobering to note that Siemens still has not fixed the vulnerabilities in its SCADA control computers.

 

 

stuxnethardware

Siemens PCL unit with three I/O modules

 

Further Reading

Planes are Unix hosts waiting to be hacked

Cracking Stuxnet - a beginner's guide


pico book

 

Comments




or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

 

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on Google+, Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Banner


Mozilla Discontinues DeepSpeech
03/07/2025

The DeepSpeech project started by Mozilla has updated its GitHub page with the message "This project is now discontinued", and a change in the project status to archived. 



Linux Passes 5% Milestone
22/07/2025

Latest figures from StatCounter show that Linux achieved a 5.03% share of the Desktop Operating System market in June 2025, something that is being viewed as a pivotal moment for open-source soft [ ... ]


More News

Last Updated ( Sunday, 11 March 2012 )