Imitating the Movies, But With a Twist

Stuxnet is a computer worm (a malicious computer program that spreads by self-replication). So what’s so special about one more computer worm/virus? Well, for starters, unlike normal viruses and worms that spread indiscriminately and don’t care who they hit or hurt, Stuxnet only targeted systems that met certain specific configurations. And those specific configurations mapped to the controls systems used to monitor Iran’s nuclear centrifuges.

And it seems to have succeeded: in November, Iran acknowledged the hit to its nuclear program due to problems with its centrifuges. So what did the worm do? It sent Iran’s nuclear centrifuges spinning out of control. But wouldn’t a reactor shut down or give some other feedback to indicate something was wrong? Normally, yes. But this worm got around that problem very ingeniously:

“The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.”

Wow! That’s like the inverted version of Ocean’s Eleven: in the movie, Brad Pitt uses fake footage of the casino vault to convince Benedict that a heist is in progress. Stuxnet uses fake sensor data to convince the operator everything’s all right!