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Because most viruses are written for Windows, reverse engineering them requires knowledge of x86 assembly language. There, Schouwenberg learned that an engineer needs specific skills to fight malware. After spending four years working for the company in the Netherlands, he went to the Boston area. Kaspersky replied by offering the 17-year-old a job, which he took. Some accused Kaspersky of having ties with the Russian government-accusations the company has denied.Ī few years after that first overture, Schouwenberg e-mailed founder Eugene Kaspersky, asking him whether he should study math in college if he wanted to be a security specialist. Such companies are judged in part on how many viruses they are first to detect, and Kaspersky was considered among the best. In the 1990s, when Schouwenberg was just a geeky teen in the Netherlands, malware was typically the work of pranksters and hackers, people looking to crash your machine or scrawl graffiti on your AOL home page.Ĭybersleuth: Roel Schouwenberg, of Kaspersky Lab, helped unravel Stuxnet and its kin in the most sophisticated family of Internet worms ever discovered.Īfter discovering a computer virus on his own, the 14-year-old Schouwenberg contacted Kaspersky Lab, one of the leading antivirus companies. Schouwenberg tells me, “We are here to save the world." The question is: Does the Kaspersky Lab have what it takes? But the hero fighting against this isn't Bruce Willis he's a scruffy 27-year-old with a ponytail. “Fiction suddenly became reality," Schouwenberg says.
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This marks a turning point in geopolitical conflicts, when the apocalyptic scenarios once only imagined in movies like Live Free or Die Hard have finally become plausible. Since the discovery of Stuxnet, Schouwenberg and other computer-security engineers have been fighting off other weaponized viruses, such as Duqu, Flame, and Gauss, an onslaught that shows no signs of abating. corporation to admit that Stuxnet had spread across its machines.Īlthough the authors of Stuxnet haven't been officially identified, the size and sophistication of the worm have led experts to believe that it could have been created only with the sponsorship of a nation-state, and although no one's owned up to it, leaks to the press from officials in the United States and Israel strongly suggest that those two countries did the deed. The next month, Chevron confirmed the speculation by becoming the first U.S. defense secretary Leon Panetta warned that the United States was vulnerable to a “cyber Pearl Harbor" that could derail trains, poison water supplies, and cripple power grids. Because someone could unsuspectingly infect a machine this way, letting the worm proliferate over local area networks, experts feared that the malware had perhaps gone wild across the world. If a worker stuck a USB thumb drive into an infected machine, Stuxnet could, well, worm its way onto it, then spread onto the next machine that read that USB drive. Stuxnet could spread stealthily between computers running Windows-even those not connected to the Internet. (Iran has not confirmed reports that Stuxnet destroyed some of its centrifuges.)
The worm's authors could thus spy on the industrial systems and even cause the fast-spinning centrifuges to tear themselves apart, unbeknownst to the human operators at the plant. Finally, it compromised the programmable logic controllers.
Then it sought out Siemens Step7 software, which is also Windows-based and used to program industrial control systems that operate equipment, such as centrifuges.
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First, it targeted Microsoft Windows machines and networks, repeatedly replicating itself.
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This worm was an unprecedentedly masterful and malicious piece of code that attacked in three phases.
#Latest worm virus 2010 install
Although a computer virus relies on an unwitting victim to install it, a worm spreads on its own, often over a computer network.
#Latest worm virus 2010 software
Recognition of such threats exploded in June 2010 with the discovery of Stuxnet, a 500-kilobyte computer worm that infected the software of at least 14 industrial sites in Iran, including a uranium-enrichment plant. headquarters in Woburn, Mass., battling the most insidious digital weapons ever, capable of crippling water supplies, power plants, banks, and the very infrastructure that once seemed invulnerable to attack. As a senior researcher for Kaspersky Lab, a leading computer security firm based in Moscow, Roel Schouwenberg spends his days (and many nights) here at the lab's U.S. This office might seem no different than any other geeky workplace, but in fact it's the front line of a war-a cyberwar, where most battles play out not in remote jungles or deserts but in suburban office parks like this one.
A life-size Batman doll stands in the hall. Cryptic flowcharts are scrawled across various whiteboards adorning the walls.