If you haven’t already seen it, don’t miss the story “Mystery Surrounds Cyber Missile That Crippled Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Ambitions.”
I found myself marveling several times at the brilliance and ingenuity of Stuxnet. The way it unfolded on the world stage seems like the sort of “series of mysterious events” that could have been in Atlas Shrugged, were it written today rather than in the 1950s.
The mystery is, in part, an illusion. Industry experts have taken apart and analyzed the Stuxnet worm and know a lot about who created it and why. The exploits on which it is based are frar from new. As far back as 2003, I designed a Stuxnet-style attack on the U.S. power industry–and used it as the foundation of a Lior Samson novel, Web Games (Gesher Press, 2010). The frightening thing is the way these vectors can be turned to point back at their inventors. As I argue, we may be next!