Tonight’s CBS 60 Minutes had an interesting segment on
security, secrecy and the cyberspace. The
segment was about the threats of cyber attacks and the government thinks the
next war will be fought in cyberspace.
The segment covered one specific sophisticated worm called “Stuxnet,” a computer
program worm first detected some two years ago by a team of researchers.
Somehow through another anti-virus team from Symantec was
checking on one of their customer’s program that they discovered the Stuxnet
worm is in their customer’s network. The customer was Iran, and the Stuxnet worm somehow
got its way into the operating system via a portable drive into their computer called
programmable logic controller. These PLCs
are responsible for maintaining, operating and monitoring factory equipments
and their centrifuges for their enriched uranium program. The worm gave the operators false reading
while the equipment can be over worked or in the case of the centrifuges, burnt
out. As the result of the worm, many Iran’s centrifuges failed which caused a huge
setback for their uranium enrichment which the US
and Israeli thinks it’s being refined for their nuclear weapon program to build
Iran’s
first nuclear weapon.
This is the result of poor communication and network security practices
and this issue has worsened since the media or the US government declared the “Cold
War” is over bullshit.
The Iranian thinks the worm was planted by the Americans and
or the Israeli to sabotage their uranium enrichment facilities.
The U.S. Cyber Command feels that once the cyber world knows
this worm exist, the hackers can reverse engineered the program and launched to
anywhere where their security is weak or non-existences. I know we’re supposed to play nice and
everyone is supposed to behave in cyberspace, but not everyone is nice and definitely
not everyone play by the rules.
The ironic part about tonight’s 60 Minutes was that the Vatican can
keep the secrets of their sex hungry priests for so long with some admitted to
have molested to as many as 100 children and that the most expensive security
systems can not keep an infected thumb drive. So much for practicing “Safe net.”
Damn, they don’t screen and train techno-cops like they used to.
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