STUXNET Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

STUXNET - Research Paper ExampleAs the engineer strung-out the computer to the Internet, the writhe spread far and wide. How the Stuxnet Worm Spread The Stuxnet wind started to spread in border 2010, but it took its first melodic line about three months from then to appear. As people learnt about the macrocosm of the worm on 15 July 2010, the servers for two send lists were attacked with the distributed denial-of-service on the industrial-systems security. Although at that time, the source of attack could non be worked out, yet it was suspected to be the Stuxnet worm. As a result of the attack, one of the two mailing lists got disabled, thus interrupting a very important informative source for the factories and the power plants. Two more variants of the Stuxnet worm surfaced the first in March 2010 and the second in April 2010. In the authors opinion, the second and substantially improved variant showed up because of slow progression of the Stuxnet worm. The third variant tha t surfaced in April 2010 had only minor improvements. There is a build time-stamp in thee worm that starts from 3 February 2010. According to the report delivered by the Sky News on 25 November 2010 in the United Kingdom, an anonymous source whose IT security organization was also unidentified direct the news to Sky News that the black market had received a variation of the Stuxnet worm, but there was lack of consensus among the security experts over this matter. How the Stuxnet Worm Works Stuxnet makes use of vulnerability just like Windows uses the crosscut files to expand to new systems. The Stuxnet worms design was bottom-up so that it could effectively attack the systems enforced for the management of industrial networks like chemical manufacturing facilities and power plants as well as the systems of Supervisory construe and Data Acquisition (SCADA). In the start, the Stuxnet worm was thought to progress through such removable drives as USB sticks. However, about two week s after the Stuxnet worm was first identified, researchers of the Kaspersky Lab working in Moscow give that an unknown security flaw in the sharing of printer resources by the Windows could also help the Stuxnet worm spread. Microsoft found a way to fix this vulnerability with MS10-061 which varies in risk from one type of windows to another. At least one aspect of what Stuxnet does is to take control of the process and to be able to do whatever the author or programmer wants it to do. This has potentially devastating consequences, and there needs to be a cluster more attention focused on it (Weiss cited in Stuxnet Worm Far). The Target of the Stuxnet Worm The main(prenominal) target of the Stuxnet worm is the sulfur software. One trait that distinguishes the Stuxnet worm from most viruses that have been identified to fitting is that it remains silent till the time the worm locates Siemens software in the Windows system. Once the Siemens software is found, the Stuxnet worm expl oits up to four 0-day attacks. The Stuxnet worm infected the SCADA systems in 14 functional plants of Siemens, though the infections could not hold the infected plants productions. According to the IDG News reports, the Stuxnet worm has infected systems at the Siemens plants in North America, Korea, and the UK, while the maximum infections have so far been made in the plants operating in