The New York Times alleged that the United States and Israel put together a computer virus, called Stuxnet, that infected Iran’s industrial process control machinery for its uranium enriching, fast spinning, nuclear centrifuges. The upshot being that the virus reportedly shut down Iran’s nuclear purification process, causing Iran to lose about a year’s worth of work toward fueling its own nuclear weapon.
What is interesting is that possibly other entities eventually caught a version of Stuxnet. Usually when you think of “catching a virus,” you think of it causing problems wherever it goes, but since it was only set up for a very specific situation in Iran, it could not do other damage anywhere else in the world. Or could it?
Entities who later realized they had indeed caught Stuxnet could actually determine that they had caught it. And, this is the interesting thing, they could deconstruct it, kind of like taking a car apart to see how the components of the latest car technology works. (For those in the know, this is called malicious software reverse…
