stuxnet

This is not your grand-pa's computer virus.

Dubbed "Stuxnet," it was discovered in June 2010 by a Belarus-based security company. Unlike ordinary computer virus that hacks consumer PCs or commercial servers, it is written specifically to attack the control of industrial systems made by German electronics conglomerate Siemens that are used in many factory floors, chemical plants, oil refineries, pipelines, and nuclear power plants. Though these industrial control systems themselves don't run on PC, Mac, or Linux operating system, those PCs that supervise them do run Windows. Stuxnet broke into these PCs, found the supervisory control and data acquisition software (SCADA), overrode the execution code with its own malicious one, and caused valves to open, alarms to turn off, safety temperature levels to reset, etc., therefore damaging/sabotaging the targeted operations.

Stuxnet virus had been found mostly in Iran (58.8%), Indonesia (18.2%), India (8.3%), US (1.6%), according to the geotagging of the IP addresses of Stuxnet-infected computers. As a matter of fact, Iran's delay of completion of its Bushehr nuclear power plant was first suspected by the West then confirmed by the Iranian government the result of Stuxnet virus infections. Also, a power glitch in July in the solar panels of India's INSAT-4B satellite causing it to lose half of its transpnding capacity was suspected to be the work of Stuxnet. Both the Iranian power plant and the Indian satellite use Siemens industrial control systems.

Who's behind such an unusual virus? No one knows. But all experts agree a computer virus (or worm) like this requires a broad spectrum of skills and resources to develop and test and spread, and a nation state is the most likely entity with such capacity.

Israeli government has been denying it has anything to do with the Stuxnet virus. But a recent finding of the name referenced by the software (Stuxnet comprises of a 600-kilobyte file and it has not yet been fully analysed) made an interesting twist toward hinting the Jewish state's possible involvement with the virus, with a Biblical clue:

The word in contention is "Myrtus” — which can be read as an allusion to Esther, or the Book of Esther, the Old Testament tale in which the Jews pre-empt a Persian plot to destroy them. If you're wondering how you get Myrtus from Esther ... Esther's original Hebrew name was Hadassah, meaning Myrtle (Myrtus). The project string “b:\myrtus\src\objfre_w2k_x86\i386\guava.pdb” appears in one of Stuxnet's drivers. The guava fruit is part of the Myrtus plant family.

Another nation state named by some as possible origin of Stuxnet is China, for the simple fact that the Chinese government indirectly owns a major share of Asia Satellite Telecommunications Co., which benefited greatly when India's INSAT-4B satellite lost most of its serving capacity and Indian statellite TV service providers had to redirect their customers' statellite dishes toward ASIASAT-5, a Chinese satellite owned and operated by Asia Satellite Telecommunications Co.

No matter who's behind it, Stuxnet is a ground breaking virus not only for its sophistication and scale of operation, but the fact that it is the first computer virus that threatens to cause physical harm through manipulation of infrastructure entities. "Giving an attacker control of industrial systems like a dam, a sewage plant or a power station is extremely unusual and makes this a serious threat with huge real world implications," says Patrick Fitzgerald, senior threat intelligence officer with Symantec. "It has changed everything."

Not necessarily for the good, unfortunately.