Why can't we talk more openly and publicly about Stuxnet? Two answers before we even get started. I don't know, and if I did, we wouldn't talk about it anyway. Something as simple and innocuous as this becomes a challenge for all of us to maintain accountability and control of our critical infrastructure systems.
This actually contains the Stuxnet virus. It's impacting industrial control. Is this something that's coming after the homeland? If you get up in the morning and turn off your alarm and make coffee, power plants, power grids, and pump gas, transportation, telecommunication, and use the ATM, you've touched industrial control systems. It's what powers our lives.
Most of these systems are relatively easy for a sophisticated hacker to get into. The security experts who are studying Stuxnet really think it required the resources of a nation state. Stuxnet. It spread to any Windows machine in the entire world.
We didn't know if it was set to turn off all electricity plants around the world, or it would start shutting things down, or launching some attack. It was blowing up centrifuges. And it was leaving no trace. There had been assassinations of nuclear scientists.
Some human assets had to be involved. Spies! It went beyond our worst fears, our worst nightmares. This is not your ordinary criminal doing this. This is someone bigger.
The monster turned against its creator. And now everyone is in this game. This has the whiff of August 1945. Somebody just used a new weapon.
And this weapon will not be put back into the box. We've been focusing on Stuxnet, but that was just a small part of a much larger mission.