Stuxnet worm analyzed as world's first true cyber-weapon
Stuxnet's creators recognized they had built the world's first true cyber-weapon and were more interested in pushing the envelope of this new type of digital warfare than causing large-scale destruction within targeted Iranian nuclear facilities, a study shows.
In an analysis released last week, Ralph Langner, head of The Langner Group and a renowned expert in industrial control systems (ICS), also refuted arguments that only a nation-state had the resources to launch a Stuxnet-like attack. Assailants with less ambition could take the lessons learned and apply them to civilian critical infrastructure, he said.
"While Stuxnet was clearly the work of a nation-state requiring vast resources and considerable intelligence future attacks on industrial control and other so-called 'cyber-physical' systems may not be," Langner said in an article he wrote about his study for Foreign Policy magazine.
