Stuxnet | Hacker News Reader

Stuxnet

en.wikipedia.org

59 pointsbobbiechen7 comments

At the time I was working as a SCADA engineer for a company that deployed Siemens PCS7 projects at quite a large scale. This worm was discovered on one of their plants. I remember afterwards it was forbidden to use any USB drive whatsoever. These systems are typically physically isolated from the internet. So every night I had to write my work to a CD to be able to get it on my laptop so I could back it up.

I was also working for an engineering company who worked with Siemens kit as a sysadmin. Our engineers found the whole thing fascinating. Something serious had happened in their "world" of PLCs

Good Times

I remember the media circus surrounding this shit. Eventually, it was found to be MOSSAD/CIA - this whole period during the Israel-USA vs Iran cold war was interesting.

Stuxnet was important because it was the first State vs State campaign in cyber warfare, but Stuxnet was a media distraction while Israel conducted other tangible sabotage..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nucle...

Pretty sure OP was having the same nostalgia I was having

How did all the information leak about this?

Was it just from people reverse engineering it, or were there leaks from intelligence agencies?

There's an incredible book by Kim Zetter called Countdown to Zero Day which is indispensable for anyone interested in Stuxnet: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18465875-countdown-to-ze...

There is also a great documentary on Hulu called Zero Days[1] that is fantastic about Stuxnet. Highly recommended.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Days

Stuxnet was discovered by Belarusian antivirus expert Sergey Ulasen, who was working for Belarusian antivirus company VirusBlokAda. Later, he moved to Kaspersky. This is how it was discovered:

"It all started when the technical support guys informed me about a rather unusual case: a customer in Iran reported arbitrary BSODs and computer reboots. They forwarded me the help-request together with info about their preliminary scanning reports."

Read the amazing interview here: https://eugene.kaspersky.com/2011/11/02/the-man-who-found-st...

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