Stuxnet

Hackers could damage US power generation plants, water treatment facilities, and other critical infrastructure with clones of the Stuxnet computer worm, warn officials at the US Department of Homeland Security.

When the Stuxnet hurt Iran's nuclear-enrichment operations, it was widely believed that it was Israel and US behind the attack.

Siemens is being accused by Gholamreza Jalali, head of Iran's civilian defense, for helping the United States and Israel to launch a cyber attack on its nuclear facilities according to Kayhan daily report.

Jalali made a statement that German engineering company who provided Iran its control systems used to operate complicated factory machinery known as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) was partially responsible for that the Stuxnet was successful.

2010, the year of tiger was a multiple-valued year for every human being on the planet. It featured both dark and bright sides in political, economic and social aspects of the world development. With this year the humanity has shifted yet to another level of its success while it suffered not less losses and failures if compared to the past times. Let us make a review and recollect the top 10 noteworthy events and developments that impacted the world in the most critical areas. 

Resuming the year events and developments Andreas M. Antonopoulos, NetworkWorld, noted that the reality is going weirder than fiction as the world was told about the operation Aurora, the first national-industrial sabotage attack with Stuxnet and in the end we see how “Wikileaks [is] about to become a constitutional crisis between the First amendment and a 1917 espionage law” Talking further on security in 2011 Antonopoulos has made the following predictions.

According to security researchers the inability of Stuxnet worm to stay unnoticed may be explained by the failure of its creators to direct to a specified target. This summer the worm which was developed to infiltrate heavy-duty industrial control programs that monitor and manage factories, oil pipelines, power plants and other critical installations came to the experts’ view.

 When you read about Stuxnet and that it used stolen digital certificates from Realtek and JMicron to sign the worm, you may have wondered what the significance of that is or why they did that. There are actually a couple of factors to consider.

When you try to install certain types of software on Windows Vista or Windows 7 it needs to be digitally signed with a trusted certificate. On Vista there is a warning dialog if the software is not digitally signed or has an untrusted certificate. On Windows 7 the file MUST be properly signed with a trusted certificate.