A Declaration of Cyber-War

Last summer, the world’s top software-security experts were panicked by the discovery of a drone-like computer virus, radically different from and far more sophisticated than any they’d seen. The race was on to figure out its payload, its purpose, and who was behind it. As the world now knows, the Stuxnet worm appears to have attacked Iran’s nuclear program. And, as Michael Joseph Gross reports, while its source remains something of a mystery, Stuxnet is the new face of 21st-century warfare: invisible, anonymous, and devastating.

All over Europe, smartphones rang in the middle of the night. Rolling over in bed, blinking open their eyes, civilians reached for the little devices and, in the moment of answering, were effectively drafted as soldiers. They shook themselves awake as they listened to hushed descriptions of a looming threat. Over the next few days and nights, in mid-July of last year, the ranks of these sudden draftees grew, as software analysts and experts in industrial-control systems gathered in makeshift war rooms in assorted NATO countries. Government officials at the highest levels monitored their work. They faced a crisis which did not yet have a name, but which seemed, at first, to have the potential to bring industrial society to a halt.

A self-replicating computer virus, called a worm, was making its way through thousands of computers around the world, searching for small gray plastic boxes called programmable-logic controllers—tiny computers about the size of a pack of crayons, which regulate the machinery in factories, power plants, and construction and engineering projects. These controllers, or P.L.C.’s, perform the critical scut work of modern life. They open and shut valves in water pipes, speed and slow the spinning of uranium centrifuges, mete out the dollop of cream in each Oreo cookie, and time the change of traffic lights from red to green.

Full Article from Vanity Fair