| | From the Wikipedia article about Stuxnet.
A study of the spread of Stuxnet by Symantec showed that the main affected countries as of August 6, 2010 were:
| Country | Infected computers |
|---|
| Iran | 62,867 | | Indonesia | 13,336 | | India | 6,552 | | United States | 2,913 | | Australia | 2,436 | | United Kingdom | 1,038 | | Malaysia | 1,013 | | Pakistan | 993 | | Finland | 7 | | Germany | 5
|
The fact that most of the systems infected are in Iran (~ 60% of total), led to the assumption that Iran was the target. Realize though that the other 40% were not targets. It is the nature of a computer worm to seek out and infect other systems. In every case so far the targets were Siemens brand industrial computers.
("Programmable Logic Controllers" or PLCs tend to offer large central processor units - CPUs - with peripheral processors, but with small memories and usually no disk drives. Of course, a wide range of configurations are made and sold. Typically lacking onboard keyboards, the Input-Output functions are given to arrays of high-speed serial connections allowing broad and rapid On-Off commands to many points at once.) Wikipedia article here gives other details..
In the USA over 3000 computers were infected, and likely damaged, mostly (we can assume) in factories, including electrical power plants and other public utlities.
Releasing Stuxnet was like releasing a biotoxin: they got their target and they were satisfied with the acceptable collateral damage. None of the infected computers is in Israel.
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 1/18, 9:51am)
|
|
