Quotes About Stuxnet

Wannacry is the Stuxnet of Ransomware

Stuxnet, the most sophisticated cyber weapon in the world, with code fifty times larger than typical malware.99 The CIA, the NSA, and Israel's elite cyber Unit 8200 reportedly joined forces.100 Forensics revealed that Stuxnet used four rare and valuable "zero day" vulnerabilities (coding flaws unknown to security researchers or software vendors) to find the precise software operating Iran's centrifuges, spread inside, hide, and destroy without a trace.101

Stuxnet, a computer worm reportedly developed by the United States and Israel that destroyed Iranian nuclear centrifuges in attacks in 2009 and 2010, is often cited as the most dramatic use of a cyber weapon.

The NSA and Israel wrote Stuxnet together.

The nations, of course, that are most at risk of a destructive digital attack are the ones with the greatest connectivity. Marcus Ranum, one of the early innovators of the computer firewall, called Stuxnet 'a stone thrown by people who live in a glass house'.

Each time Stuxnet infected a system, it "phoned home" to one of two internet domains masquerading as soccer fan sites—mypremierfutbol.com and todaysfutbol.com. The domain names, registered by someone who used fake names and fraudulent credit cards, pointed to servers in Denmark and Malaysia

Each time Stuxnet infected a system, it "phoned home" to one of two internet domains masquerading as soccer fan sites—mypremierfutbol.com and todaysfutbol.com. The domain names, registered by someone who used fake names and fraudulent credit cards, pointed to servers in Denmark and Malaysia that served as command-and-control stations for the attack.

But more important, he also spotted an encrypted block of code that turned out to be Stuxnet's mother lode—a large .DLL file (dynamic link library) that contained about three dozen other .DLLs and components inside, all wrapped together in layers of encryption like Russian nesting dolls.

In addition to these spreading mechanisms, Stuxnet had a peer-to-peer component that let it update old versions of itself when new ones were released. This let them update Stuxnet remotely on machines that weren't directly connected to the internet but were connected to other machines on a local network. To spread an update, Stuxnet installed a file-sharing server and client on each infected machine,

Before Stuxnet's malicious commands went into action, the malware sat patiently on the PLC for about two weeks, sometimes longer, recording legitimate operations as the controller sent status reports back to monitoring stations. Then when Stuxnet's malicious commands leapt into action, the malware replayed the recorded data back to operators to blind them to anything amiss on the machines

In the summer of 2010, thousands of computers controlling the Iranian nuclear project were infected with the Stuxnet virus. Labeled one of the most sophisticated in the world, Stuxnet struck computers controlling the Natanz centrifuges and wreaked havoc.