Stuxnet is a sophisticated weapon designed to wriggle into Iran’s nuclear facilities. It now turns out that it escaped, infecting hundreds of thousands of personal computers — yours, quite possibly.
Earlier this week, another virus, Flame, was discovered, though it would be better to describe it as a cyber-snooping device. It was not designed to do damage, but to steal information from the computers of Iranian nuclear scientists.
Experts say we should not fear these cyber weapons, but perhaps the collateral damage they may cause. Stuxnet had a very specific purpose — to make the centrifuges at the nuclear facilities spin out of control. It did nothing when it found its way into PCs. “Not many people have centrifuges plugged into their Windows PC,” said Graham Cluley, from Sophos, the internet security company. But the emergence of these weapons may be of greater concern if you work in a government department or a major company. Here, your computer is a gateway to the organisation you work for.
Rik Ferguson, a senior analyst at Trend Micro, the web security specialists, said that the biggest concern about Stuxnet and Flame was that others would try to engineer them for criminal ends.
The public should be concerned about the proliferation of computer malware. The precursor to Stuxnet was a worm called Conficker, which burrowed into 1.5 million computers in 195 countries in 2008. The evidence suggests that Conficker was not created by a nation state, but by skilled hackers. It was never switched on and is dormant in millions of computers.
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But you can assume that one day someone will create a vicious virus, one meant to create more havoc that its predecessors.