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It’s the best of times and the worst of times for hacker culture. On the one hand, this is a moment of history-making triumph for a cyber-worm, the complex computer virus known and feared as “Stuxnet.” A stunning evolutionary leap in development of “malware” (the generic term for the mischief-making software a virus embeds in computers via digital networks). Composed, it has been reported, of 15,000 lines of code. Stuxnet exhibited virtual superpowers last fall by penetrating, taking control of, and jamming into self-destruction some 1,000 precisely calibrated uranium-refining centrifuges in Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility.
And then, under another alias, another digital disguise (I see the worm in a Bogart-like virtual trench coat), Stuxnet surreptitiously slipped into the brand-new Iranian nuclear reactor at Bushehr last fall as well. This is the reactor that had just taken delivery of nuclear fuel from the Russians (though it still hadn’t been loaded in), the one proclaimed to be for peaceful uses, nonetheless capable of making bomb-grade plutonium as a “byproduct.”
Stuxnet seized the control panel of the Bushehr reactor and did its Stuxnet thing and shut that huge, $1 billion complex down. Just like that. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was compelled to concede the reactor had been the source of “problems” but claimed they’d been “fixed.” That was two months ago. The reactor is still shut down. Some analysts estimate that Iran’s attainment of nuclear bomb-making capacity has been pushed back at least two years.
And the problems may be permanent, perennial, with malicious features as yet unrevealed by the worm. That’s the thing, both admirable and potentially disturbing about Stuxnet: We don’t yet know whether it’s exercised its full capabilities. We don’t know what other tricks Stuxnet has in store. Or whether it can ever be eradicated from an infected machine. Whether it can turn on us. We just know it’s awesome.
Perhaps the ultimate tribute to it was by a computer security expert who called its advent”and the swath of destruction it cut through Iran’s nuclear program”" an Oppenheimer moment ” in the history of hacking. A moment in which malware viruses had made the leap from troublemaking but controllable depredations to potentially unstoppable, history-changing weapons , their capabilities miles ahead of their predecessors’, the way the first nuclear weapon Oppenheimer built at Los Alamos left mere TNT in its wake and shadowed the world we live in with the threat of cataclysmic extinction.
Computer-security experts who have handled the most complex “malware” virus infections are agog.
As a German based computer security consultant, Ralph Langner, put it , “The Iranians
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