It’s a plot straight out of Hollywood: Mysterious hackers create a malicious computer code designed to seize control of critical equipment worldwide. It turns out it really happened. In June a computer security firm in Belarus found a sophisticated, aggressive, self-replicating program, or worm, on a client’s computers in Iran. The program was designed to attack and sabotage control systems used in manufacturing facilities, power grids, pipelines, and nuclear plants.
No one knows where the worm was created or what it was targeting. Researchers know only that it was capable of causing physical damage; for instance, it could make a motor rev too quickly and even blow up. “Using something in the cyberworld to control something in the physical world is something we’ve never seen before,” says Liam O Murchu of the computer security company Symantec. “We’ve never seen any industrial control system being attacked before, and we’ve never seen ...
