Stuxnet and What it Means for You

© 2024 by Mark McWiggins

Stuxnet was the Israelis’ surreptitious way of disabling the Iranian nuclear war machine without firing a shot. The US-sponsored operatives left some USB drives infected with the Stuxnet virus which, when plugged into the Iranians’ network, subtly sped up the centrifuges until they (a) stopped working and (b) eventually froze or melted down.

What this means for you: since the security researchers published their results, the good thing is that we know what to do to protect ourselves. Unfortunately for us there are bad guys out there who are just as knowledgable.

So for you: If you ever use a USB drive for anything, make sure that you get it directly from the manufacturer. If you don’t you could lose your bank account or even much worse.

Software runs the world; security researchers have shown attackers controlling self-driving cars as well as other industrial machinery like dam controllers. So security in this and as well as all our lives is paramout to keep them from getting their greedy (or much worse) mits on our computers.

It was a security flaw that quite likely gave Donald Trump the 2016 election when John Podesta clicked on a link that subtly redirected all mail from the infamous server that Hilary Clinton had in our house … elsewhere, and apparently one of them was James Comey, whose upbraiding of Ms. Clinton just days before the election probably threw the election to Donald Trump (Source; NyTimes a while back)

That’s it .. I’ve been forced to make myself a full featured security geek since we moved into this house on the Xfinity network without a firewall. .. I had to write a simple packet-filter myself in Python, but it’s too slow to really keep up with the traffic. I tried Mojo a while back, but there seems to have been a bug in that version. But the real solution is a hardware-based firewall.

Call me tomorrow if you would like to hire me or just to discuss this. Thanks, Mark McWiggins 425–369–8286