The New Type of Warfare

While researching for class I found the new type of warfare. This is warfare through technology. Most people think, “oh the war of robots.” However, this is much more dangerous and scary than that. This is a program that someone can carry on their USB and create tons of damage. For instance the first attack, Stuxnet attacked a penetrated an Iranian nuclear power plant making them remove 1000-2000 fuses that were malfunctioning. People have no proof that Stuxnet was the reason and aren’t able to find that proof. However, when they look at the code there is no other explanation for the malfunction. Part of Stuxnet that was alarming was that the malfunctions don’t show up right away. The Iranians weren’t able to figure out what was going on for a long time. The person that planted the worm in the system had to know the plant better than the Iranians. The code was highly sophisticated and hard to analyze. No one knows who made the worm but a lot of people think the worm should never have been planted. It now gives a lot of countries new ways to destroy each other. They can attack power plants, government computers and plans, or directly attack the citizens of each country. 60 Minute video on Stuxnet
There was another worm made after Stuxnet to gather information from every computer possible from, “a limited number of organizations for their specific assets.” (Researchers warn of new Stuxnet worm) The worm was gathering their information about the manufacturing of industrial control systems. This worm’s name was Duqu. This worm had parts of it that were identical to Stuxnet. Meaning that more worms are being made based off it and therefore creating a new type of warfare. It becomes easier for countries to get information about each other and destroy each other subtly from the inside. The affects can be huge and create more problems than we have ever had before. The issue is there isn’t much anyone can do about it. They are high sophisticated worms that show no trace and don’t allow the person being affected that they are being attacked. The worms prevent operators to see that the equipment was malfunctioning and gathers information without anyone knowing. Whoever made the original Stuxnet shouldn’t have actually used it. It has grown into something more and more dangerous than anything we have found before. However, people don’t believe the worm was meant to be publicized. It was just made to do damage and die. Once it was made public it became dangerous. If it weren’t made public by Symantec we wouldn’t have as much of an issue. We now need to somehow find a way to protect ourselves from any attack that is like this because it could potentially ruin a country more and faster than anything has before.
To learn more about Duqu read this article: BBC Article