A Declaration of Cyber-War | Culture | Vanity Fair
►http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/04/stuxnet-201104
The cyber-world where #Stuxnet lives is so murky, so hard to know the truth about, that some experts still question certain elements of the public story. From the beginning, many have found it odd that, of all the security companies in the world, an obscure Belarusian firm should be the one to find this threat—and odder still that the serial rebooting that gave Stuxnet away has been reported nowhere else, as far as most of the worm’s top analysts have heard. Such facts moved one former C.I.A. official to suggest that perhaps Stuxnet was not actually discovered—but dropped. Maybe its limited impact on Natanz indicates that it was not fully successful as a cyber-operation. After being detected by Iran, it may have been retooled by the country as “psyops”—psychological operations—against the West. Robert Baer, the former C.I.A. officer and author of The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower, says, “The moment Iran caught Stuxnet, they could easily have put out misinformation”—to the effect that their nuclear program had been set back several years—“simply to alleviate meetings in Western capitals. So that everyone will say, ‘All right, Stuxnet worked.’ ”