Stuxnet: Cyberwar Revolution in Military Affairs

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Stuxnet: Cyberwar Revolution in Military Affairs
by Paulo Shakarian

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On June 17th, 2010, security researchers at a small Belarusian firm known as VirusBlockAda identified malicious software (malware) that infected USB memory sticks. In the months that followed, there was a flurry of activity in the computer security community – revealing that this discovery identified only one component of a new computer worm known as Stuxnet. This software was designed to specifically target industrial equipment. Once it was revealed that the majority of infections were discovered in Iran, along with an unexplained decommissioning of centrifuges at the Iranian fuel enrichment plant (FEP) at Natanz, many in the media speculated that the ultimate goal of Stuxnet was to target Iranian nuclear facilities. In November of 2010, some of these suspicions were validated when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad publically acknowledged that a computer worm created problems for a “limited number of our [nuclear] centrifuges.” Reputable experts in the computer security community have already labeled Stuxnet as “unprecedented,” an “evolutionary leap,” and “the type of threat we hope to never see again."

In this paper, I argue that this malicious software represents a revolution in military affairs (RMA) in the virtual realm – that is Stuxnet fundamentally changes the nature of cyber warfare. There are four reasons to this claim: (1) Stuxnet represents the first case in which industrial equipment was targeted with a cyber-weapon, (2) there is evidence that the worm was successful in its targeting of such equipment, (3) it represents a significant advance in the development of malicious software, and (4) Stuxnet has shown that several common assumptions about cyber-security are not always valid. In this paper I examine these four points as well as explore the future implications of the Stuxnet RMA.

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Paulo Shakarian is a Captain in the U.S. Army and a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the University of Maryland (College Park) and will soon take up a position teaching computer science at the U.S. Military Academy. He holds a BS from the U.S. Military Academy and an MS from the University of Maryland (College Park), both in computer science.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Military Academy, United States Cyber Command, the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the United States Government.



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