Keeping with the William Gibson theme, the future - whoops, I meant "the present"- look increasingly like something dreamed up by said sci fi author. This week we learned about
STUXNET: Government Black Ice designed to attack industrial control facilities, and in particular the Bashir Nuclear Reactor. The sophisticated source code includes the ability to inject itself into programmable logic devices; hacking the actual hardware itself, relying on proprietary hardware secretes stolen from two Taiwanese manufacturers. Apparently too complex to have been written by a hacker in a dorm room, the media concludes that it must be "state sponsored". Maybe. Probably. But in a present that increasingly looks like the cyberscape described in Neuromancer we shouldn't rule out multinational corporations as the source. As pointed out in the media, STUXNET *is* a *weapon*. Cyberspace is a battlefield where corporations, states, and individuals can wage war on a practically equal footing, with the ability to cloak their identity. Imagine that; anonymous war with motives known only to the participants. Target: a nuclear reactor.
Posts
