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

by Kim Zetter

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.2 The systems also control the pumps that transmit raw sewage to treatment plants and prevent water reservoirs from overflowing, and they open and close the valves in gas pipelines to prevent pressure buildups that can cause deadly ruptures and explosions, such as the one that killed eight people and destroyed thirty-eight homes in San Bruno, California, in 2010.

It wasn’t searching for just any S7-315 and S7-417 PLC it could find: the PLCs had to be configured in a very precise way.

They flew low as they crossed the border into Syria and took out a radar station near the Turkish border using electronic attacks and precision bombs. About twenty minutes later, they unloaded their cargo onto the Al Kibar complex before safely returning home without incident. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad downplayed the strike, saying the Israelis hit nothing but an empty military building.

Thomas C. Reed, who worked with Weiss on the National Security Council, wrote a book that briefly mentioned the Farewell Dossier and attributed a 1982 Siberian pipeline explosion to the CIA scheme—the

It turned out the attackers had pulled this off using something called an MD5 hash collision.

When the Kaspersky researchers learned of it, they dubbed it the “God-mode exploit,”

The attackers behind Duqu and Stuxnet had already struck at the underpinnings of the validation system that made the internet possible—first by stealing individual security certificates from the companies in Taiwan to sign the Stuxnet drivers, then by sending Duqu to steal data from a certificate authority itself. But this exploit went even further than that by subverting the trust between the world’s biggest software maker and its customers.

they likely were just the shallow tip of a stockpile of tools and weapons the United States and Israel had built.

That showa state run cyber armies are investing heavily on compromise computers and stealing intellectual properties and private personal data

They couldn’t rule out the possibility that it was something destructive like Stuxnet or Wiper or that it was extra-sensitive because it had something to do with Gauss’s banking Trojan and financial networks.

“Cyber, in my modest opinion, will soon be revealed to be the biggest revolution in warfare, more than gunpowder and the utilization of air power in the last century,” Israeli Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi has said.20

Cyberspace, he said, “is made for plausible deniability.”