The debate over Iran’s nuclear program heated up over the summer, with advocates for a military strike against Tehran at loggerheads with analysts calling for a diplomatic resolution.
Unknown to many of them at the time, a computer virus, likely written by a government, was moving quickly around the globe, infecting specific computer systems at nuclear plants.
“An electronic war has been launched against Iran,” Mahmoud Liaii, a top official in Tehran, was quoted as saying in September, after the country confirmed the worm infected its systems.
By the time he reacted, a technology firm in Bulgaria had already exposed the existence of what became known as the Stuxnet virus and Siemens, the German company which made the targeted systems, was working on a fix.
Experts believe the virus was likely around since 2009, sliding under firewalls undetected.
Stuxnet alerted the world yet again to a recurring problem which was brought to the international forefront in 2000, when a virus with the enticing message, “I love you,” caused billions of dollars in damage around the world.
Two Philippine students, using equipment worth less than 1,000 dollars, were behind that attack and were later set free after authorities realized they had violated no law.
Since then, viruses have become subtler, faster, more aggressive and harder to trace, while the nascent rulebook is still weak.
“We are not looking at threats in a traditional sense. It is not business as usual,” said Alex Ntoko, who heads up the International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU) Corporate Strategy Division. “Any individual who can write code is a potential superpower.”
Consultants suggest that even the technological heavyweights have been lax in the cyber world.
Israel only recently began to limit its soldiers’ access to the web when they were on military computers — years after the first top-secret documents accidentally entered public online domain.
Earlier this year, Noah…