Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

by Kim Zetter

Packers are digital tools that compress and mangle code to make it slightly harder for antivirus engines to spot the signatures inside and for forensic examiners to quickly determine what a code is doing.

PLCs are used with a variety of automated control systems that include the better-known SCADA system (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) as well as distributed control systems and others that keep the generators, turbines, and boilers at power plants running smoothly.

In amassing zero-day exploits for the government to use in attacks, instead of passing the information about holes to vendors to be fixed, the government has put critical-infrastructure owners and computer users in the United States at risk of attack from criminal hackers, corporate spies, and foreign intelligence agencies who no doubt will discover and use the same vulnerabilities for their own operations.

But it’s a government model that relies on keeping everyone vulnerable so that a targeted few can be attacked—the equivalent of withholding a vaccination from an entire population so that a select few can be infected with a virus.