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Comment by achille | Hacker News Reader

The chief Iranian computer scientist in charge of managing Stuxnet was killed by a magnet car bomb attached by a motorcyclist.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-01-11/iran-nuc...

No exploit > No Stuxnet > No Death

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While I think there are clearly cases to be made linking cyber attacks to physical violence and harm, I'm not sure this is one of them. This was a chemist, not a computer scientist, and it's plausible that Stuxnet slowed more violent/coercive efforts against Iranian scientists.

That article mentions Stuxnet once and draws no relationship between the killing and the virus.

Nation States that employ offensive cyber operations will NOT stop at only targeting computer infrastructure. Many technologists/hackers naturaly like to separate the world into two spheres (the so called "real world" and the "online" world), somehow thinking that they are above the physical fray. The truth is that hackers and security professionals on all sides will increasingly expose themselves to physical attacks like this. Any militarily sound employment of cyber warfare will include a physical attack component, whether covert or overt, depending on the current stage of the conflict.

That still sounds like someone using a conventional weapon to kill someone, it's a pretty big stretch to compare malware to a bullet.

Intelligence is a major part of warfare. It's a lot easier to assassinate people if you have good means of finding the people you want dead.

Well, I have no problem with calling it cyberintelligence, or even cyberespionage, but just because espionage is part of warfare doesn't make it warfare.

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