Pros And Cons Of Stuxnet In Iran

Technology continues to advance at an alarming pace with no end in sight. With this advancement comes more modernized and lethal weapons of war whose capabilities and destructive power often exceed our wildest nightmares. Through this modernization a new silent and unseen, although no less deadly, a weapon has appeared in the form of code freely roaming cyberspace. This weapon is known as Stuxnet and has the potential to be one of the most catastrophic weapons ever developed within the cyber domain. In this paper, we will discuss what Stuxnet is, its abilities and limitations, and the damaged caused thus far. We will also be discussing possible future problems caused by this malicious code and possible impacts to the United States and its allies

It has been reported as many as 984 uranium enriching centrifuges were damaged or destroyed by the attack and can account for an estimated 30% decrease in enrichment efficiency within Iran (Holloway, 2015). This tactic of only targeting a few of the centrifuges over a long term period of time is estimated to have set back the Iranian nuclear program by two years, something that a simultaneous catastrophic destruction of all operating centrifuges wouldn’t have caused due to Iran’s large supply of backup centrifuges. This attack method also had a physiological benefit of slowly and unseemly causing destruction, it drove Iranian engineers crazy. The constant failure of systems without knowing a cause and increased pressure from the Iranian government put a huge amount of stress on scientists, diminishing their moral. Iran was already 10 years into their development, something that only took Pakistan two years to accomplish to a much higher state of success, and despite sizeable amount of money and a program jump-start from Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan network they still could not produce enough weapons-grade material to construct a bomb. If Iran and its engineers didn’t look completely incompetent before, they certainly did during Stuxnet attack. While many deem the discovery and lack of actual damage to the Iranian nuclear

Rather than trying to spread as widely as possible, it had a very specific set of parameters only allowing it to infect three other computers. This worm, unlike any before it, also came with a safeguard of a self-destruct mechanism on June 24, 2012. On that date, the worm will stop spreading and delete itself (Schneier, 2010). This makes Stuxnet not only a new highly sophisticated weapon, designed to cause physical damage via cyber means but one that was able to conduct a successful infiltration and attack on a highly secured site with no loss of life, something no other weapon could do. While this may be argued as an ethical matter, later on, it is prudent to note that the attack only targeted and affected a facility that was already the target of diplomatic efforts and economic sanctions. The targets were illegally obtained centrifuges used to conduct unsanctioned and illicit research in order to create nuclear weapons. Perhaps this will be the future of warfare, fought from behind a computer where the only casualties are software and hardware devices used to create weapons of mass destruction (Singer,