Where is the origin of Stuxnet? by Barbora Misakova

Being a hacker must be fun. And sometimes you can even feel like a “God”, especially when you succeed in attacking some important facilities. The latest malicious code, that shuffled the cards in the hackers’ world, called Stuxnet, was designed to go after several “high-value targets” at least according to Liam O Murchu, manager of security response operations at Symantec Corp. Creation of this code requires a team at least 5 highly educated hackers. Neither government experts, nor outside analysts were able to say who developed it and why. Malware which infected about 45,000 computer systems was apparently created to infiltrate into industrial! control plants. As Reuters informed, U.S. officials said that Stunex was the first malicious computer code specifically created to take over systems that control the inner workings of industrial plants. If such an attack was successful, it would result in catastrophic physical or property damage and loss, what is not very optimistic information for Iran, where are nearly 60 percent of the computers infected with Stuxnet. Indonesia represents 18 percent of infected computers, and remaining 2 percents are in the U.S. Such sophisticated code would not be easy for a normal group to put together. There are only three possibilities: “it was either a well-funded private entity or it was a government agency or state sponsored project” added O Murchu. That throws suspicion on China, Russia, Israel, Britain, Germany or the United States, but no clues pointing to a country of origin have been found so far.

related story (sgx18290): http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100926/ap_on_hi_te/us_computer_...

by Barbora Misakova for Cantell TV (http://cantell.tv)

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