Stuxnet a Wake-Up Call

With all the hullabaloo created by Stuxnet and the Iranian centrifuges in recent weeks, its hard not to think about possible dooms-day scenarios. According to one inside report the Stuxnet worm has caused the following damage on the Iranian certfuges causing them to shut down until further notice. (This is all hearsay):

The worm “specifically controls frequency converter drives” that normally run between 807 Herz and 1210 Herz, researcher Eric Chien of the computer security company Symantec, said in an e-mail to the AP. “These are subsequently changed to run at 1410Hz, then 2Hz, and then 1064Hz.”

Iran nuclear expert David Albright said it was impossible to say what would cause a disruption strong enough to idle the centrifuges but “Stuxnet would do just that. “It would send (centrifuge) speeds up and then suddenly drop them,” said Albright of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, which has tracked Iran for signs of covert proliferation.

Albright and a colleague, Andrea Stricker, last week released a study applying Chien’s finding to centrifuges. He said the worm appeared capable of pushing centrifuge speeds above their normal speeds, up to 1,410 Herz, or cycles per second, and then suddenly dropping speeds to 2 cycles per second, disrupting their operations and destroying some in the process.

Read the entire article here: http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2010/11/22/iaea-inspectors-stuxnet-mayve-shut-down-iranian-enrichment-program/

So if this is true the designers of the worm seem to have created it in a way that it would only disrupt and destroy the equipment capable of bringing Iran into the "Nuclear Club". With all the focus going on about the who and the why of Stuxnet, we're not looking into the future about what I'm calling "Stuxnets Revenge".

What if the designers didn't want to just stop the machinery from working? What if they wanted mass causality of life? With global terror roaring through the world I see this as only a matter of time. When will we wake up and start protecting our critical infrastructure? We can't wait for a "Cyber 9/11" before we start taking action. At that point its just too late.