Skip to content

Life in Italics

“Books, blogs, articles and other stuff”

June 27, 2011 Coolest Computer Virus in History

Before I cobble together my thoughts on the coolest (and most dangerous?) computer virus in the short history of computer viruses (viri? I’m in a quizzical mood), I wanted to take a moment to let you know that, yes, I do intend to blog about the book that I’m reading… As soon as I finish it. Given my curent pace of literary consumption and understanding, that could well be next year. Histories aren’t exactly quick reads, and given that I started this one with very little in the way of native knowledge on the subject, I’m moving through it at a snail’s pace. I’m sure you’ll be riveted by the review if it ever comes.

In the interest of keeping things moving here on the blog, though. I thought I’d do a more regular posting of blogs that I’m reading. If you follow me on Twitter (@matthroberts), you already know that one of my favorite blogs is Fast Co. Design. It’s an eclectic mix of awesome design projects from around the world. I regularly read and link articles that are interesting to me (and now that Liss has hooked me up with Pinterest, you can see what I think is interesting anytime – not that you care to). Anyway, I was reading Infographic Of The Day: The Computer Virus That Crashed Iran’s Nukes, and I quickly hit the video that the article referred to.

The production quality of the video itself is astoundingly fresh, but the content – wow. The video seems to take for granted that folks already have heard about Stuxnet (otherwise known as the coolest computer virus in history), but this was my first exposure (see what I did there?). Because I’m highly considerate of my loyal readership of 4, I’ve embedded the video below for your enjoyment. Take 3 minutes to watch it.

How crazy is this virus? Seriously – the entire world has been trying to derail Iran’s nuclear efforts, and along comes some unknown group and does everyone else a huge solid. Thanks fellas. If Barack Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize for simply getting elected, surely the Nobel Foundation can find a way to award the prize to an anonymous group. Of course, the video ends on an ominous tone: the virus is available as open-source code. Which means if someone can unravel the world’s most complicated computer virus, they will wield an unimaginable amount of digital power.

The most thoroughly interesting part of this story to me is that Iran has now beefed up its digital task force to have the second largest team of hackers on a government payroll in the world. They’ve got access to the open-source virus as much as anyone else, and they still haven’t figured it out. It could be that the publishing of the source code of the virus was one of the largest proverbial middle fingers in history. A way for whatever group that constructed the virus to taunt Iran after the fact. Whether Stuxnet ultimately returns with another crippling implementation or not remains to be seen. One thing is clear, though: Stuxnet is awesome in every sense of the word.

Tags: , ,