Gone in 16 seconds

Here is a link from the other blog that I maintain at The India Story.

This article is about Rajat Gupta.

The Stuxnet Virus

Reports of a complicated virus that hit Iran's nuclear facilities surfaced in 2010. It was so complicated that a team at Symantec spent a month analysing it and still felt that it might be missing something. The usual time for the team was a couple of days!!!

This virus, soon dubbed the Stuxnet Virus, used a “zero-day” exploit to spread. Zero-days are the most dangerous of weapons in a Hacker's arsenal. They exploit vulnerabilities in software that are yet unknown to the software maker or antivirus vendors. And they are not easy to put together. Not only does it require a high level of programming skill but it takes a lot of patience to find the weakenesses and exploit them. Because of this out of more than 12 million pieces of malware that antivirus researchers discover each year, fewer than a dozen use a zero-day exploit.

This article takes an in-depth look at the episode. And here is the Timeline.
Why talk about this event that is almost a year old now? Well, there are reports of a New Stuxnet worm that is targetting companies in Europe. This could get interesting.