8-Jan-2024:
Interesting news about Stuxnet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet) today.
Stuxnet was a virus detected at centrifuges the Iranese Nuclear uranium enrichment facilities in Natanz. The drives, controlled by Siemens PCS-7 and steered via the Siemens Profibus-DP protocol, were sending false signals as the CPU’s were infected with an engineered virus.
The drives were steered to go slower, but the CPU send out a message to the drives to run faster.
Ralph Langner (a virus expert) provided an in depth analysis of Stuxnet: See YouTube Movie (link).
For non techies, the TED Talk (link) is a better movie to watch and get an understanding.
An Iranian controls engineer discovered this unreliable behaviour and raised the red flag.
this has probably orevented a disast of the nuclear meltdown of the nuclear enrichment fability.
Today the news reported a Dutch logistics provider consultant living and working in Dubai, named Erik van Sabben, was working for the AIVD & MIVD, supported the Israel/USA program to develop and effect the virus as cyber warfare methodology.
I have studied other cyber attacks as the one that caused the power outage in the USA by an offset in the time synchronisation of SMTP, that disturbed the time synchronisation between the phases of the power plants in case of a power trip and another power plant taking over. This virus was developed by an MIT student, that was frustrated that he was expelled. Strange enough all reports can hardly be found with Google anymore, but this is the best article (link).
Another good example is the Flame virus, as it showed a burning USA flag, also known as Shamoon, that locked the majority of Saudi Aramco’s 30.000 PC’s and also Qatar RasGas PC’s. The virus addressed the BIOS, so the computers could not be started up anymore, timed during Ramadan, to enlarge the impact. The group “Cutting Sword of Justice” was claiming this attack on behalf of the surpressed muslim states by the Saudi Kingdom. See the wikipedia explanation (link).