This story was at the top of hacker news this morning. It’s a fascinating read, even if you know nothing about programming. And it’s a riveting true story. I’m convinced this would make a fantastic movie.
I didn’t quote any of it because it’d be hard to do so without including spoilers. But read it to the end. Fantastic.
I have seen speculation mooted that one of the problems Obama faced in responding to some Chinese and Russian hacking was that the US is *so* burrowed in to their systems that he faced real difficulty in retaliating in ways that wouldn’t reveal the staggering extent of American capabilities.
Hell, Stuxnet was a decade ago.
Imagine what they can do today,..
Yeah, we definitely passed a point-of-no-return after the Stuxnet news broke. I shudder to ponder when AI would be strong enough to replicate this on its own.
Wired had a terrific article about it a few years ago: https://www.wired.com/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/ Well worth the read if you want to dig in a bit deeper than the Quora post did.
Essentially all of those possibilities were discussed in the 1980s, even the early 1980s when worms were found on minicomputer networks. Although including the capability of changing code in master system ROM from the user space is not something that the architects at Data General, DEC, etc would have thought much of. Still, most of the capabilities described were observed in the wild during the 1990s, those of us with Internet/general systems networking experience and also industrial controls shook our heads when the air gap between the general network and the industrial systems was removed, and anyone paying attention since 2000 has had a pretty good suspicion that the mal-tools the article describes were available and deployed. Remember the Belgian professor who was deemed insane/delusional because he claimed that isolated laptops in his lab were becoming infected? I believe three methods for doing exactly that have since been published.
It has been true for all of recorded history that determined, persistent offense eventually defeats any defense. Whoever put this thing together were motivated, determined, and persistent. The “most sophisticated software ever”? Not even close.