Gen. Hayden: Stuxnet virus “Not an act of war”
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57390498/gen-hayden-stuxnet-virus-not-an-act-of-war/
There is no shred of doubt in my mind that the US would consider stuxnet an act of war if it were used against us, so it seems disingenuous in the extreme to claim that Iran shouldn’t consider stuxnet an act of war. It seems I haven’t commented on stuxnet before (at least the search tool for the blog isn’t turning anything up), so I will add some additional thoughts…
I think stuxnet was a really bad idea because unlike a conventional weapon that destroys itself under proper use, the stuxnet weapon (I can’t consider it anything else based on what I have read about it) not only left a pristine copy of itself on the target machines, but its very means of attacking the target left copies of itself all over the ‘net. It is very true in the world of technology that some problems are very intractable until one person has a bit of inspiration and suddenly what was once ‘impossible’ becomes trivially obvious. I don’t want to trivialize what stuxnet is purported to have done, but the thing is, now that the hacker community has a working copy of the code it becomes almost trivial for it to be reused. Unlike, say, nuclear weapons that still requires an unfeasibly large lump of highly enriched uranium, in the case of stuxnet the possession of the code is possession of the ‘highly enriched uranium’ and the weapon can now be ‘mass produced’ and used indiscriminately. I have read articles where infosec researchers have seen bits of stuxnet packaged as libraries and are now being actively used in the hacker community. I consider the temporary reduction in Iran’s abilities to enrich uranium (something, btw, they have the legal, moral and ethical right to do, a fact most conveniently ignored by US media and government) a trivial benefit at the huge expense of releasing such a potent weapon to the masses.
It is clear to me that the people making the decisions (stuxnet was clearly the result of a well funded group with strong backing of one or more governments) weren’t thinking about consequences. Of course that could be said (and has been said) about the whole Iraq thing, so I doubt any sort of rational cost/benefit analysis is in the making.
