Whatever its origin, the Stuxnet worm provided something that
few publicly-debated online incidents have offered to date. For
at least 15 years, security experts have warned that cyber
attacks would one day strike at “critical infrastructure” –
whether it’s power grids, energy supply, air traffic control (in
the more extreme imagination of Richard Clarke, at least),
emergency services and so on. Real-world incidents have been
limited, however: most countries have no single electricity
“off-switch” accessible from the Internet, for example. In
attacking SCADA software, Stuxnet has acted as a proof-of-
concept for something rarely seen in the wild. Arguably, it also
demonstrated that environments like SCADA systems are, to date,
not typically Internet-connected: its medium of infection was
USB keys. But in a world that’s probably growing weary of the
jump-at-shadows mindset of IT security journalism, Stuxnet
wasn’t a shadow but a real event. Dr Prescott Winter, former
director and CIO of the US National Security