Stuxnet and the Age of Digital Warfare

Monday, February 2, 2015
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
(Pacific)

Encina Hall (2nd floor)

Speaker: 
  • Kim Zetter

Abstract: In January 2010, inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency noticed that centrifuges at an Iranian uranium enrichment plant were failing at an unprecedented rate. The cause was a complete mystery—apparently as much to the technicians replacing the centrifuges as to the inspectors observing them.

Then, five months later, a seemingly unrelated event occurred: A computer security firm in Belarus was called in to troubleshoot some computers in Iran that were crashing and rebooting repeatedly and found some malicious code on them. At first, the firm’s analysts believed the code was simply a routine piece of malware. But as they and other experts around the world investigated, they discovered a mysterious virus of unparalleled complexity.

They had, they soon learned, stumbled upon the world’s first digital weapon. For Stuxnet, as it came to be known, was unlike any other virus or worm built before: Rather than simply hijacking targeted computers or stealing information from them, it escaped the digital realm to wreak actual, *physical *destruction on a nuclear facility.

Author Kim Zetter, a senior writer for WIRED magazine, recently published a book on Stuxnet. In this presentation, she'll tell the story about Stuxnet's planning, execution and discovery and why the attack was so unique and sophisticated. She'll also discuss the repercussions of the assault and how critical infrastructure in the U.S. is susceptible to the same kind

About the Speaker: Kim Zetter is an award-winning investigative journalist and author who covers cybersecurity, cybercrime, cyber warfare, privacy and civil liberties. She has been covering computer security and the hacking underground since 1999, most currently as a staff reporter for Wired, where she has been reporting since 2003. She was a finalist for an Investigative Reporters and Editors award in 2005 for a series of investigative pieces she wrote about the security problems with electronic voting machines and the controversial companies that make them. In 2006 she broke a story for Salon about a secret NSA room at an AT&T facility in Missouri that was believed to be  siphoning internet data from the telecom’s network operations center. In  2007 she wrote a groundbreaking three-part story for Wired on the cybercriminal underground, which exposed the world of online carding  markets and the players behind them. In 2010, she and a Wired colleague broke the story about the arrest of Bradley Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking millions of classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks. In 2011, she wrote an extensive feature about Stuxnet, a sophisticated digital weapon that was launched by the U.S. and Israel to sabotage Iran’s uranium enrichment program.  She recently completed a book on the topic.

Kim Zetter's book on Stuxnet, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon, can be purchased by following this link