MITM

There has been a lot of media coverage and discussion of the Stuxnet malware, and its impact on industrial control system (ICS) and SCADA security. We are one of the groups guilty of creating a Stuxnet publishing industry.

The Stuxnet story is getting stranger by the minute. First Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, gave a press conference earlier today where he admitted that Stuxnet had hit Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges.

Over the past two weeks, there has been considerable progress in determining exactly what industrial process Stuxnet’s creators were trying to destroy. This news is not good for the industrial control system and SCADA communities.

First the Symantec team announced that one of Stuxnet’s payloads was designed to change the output frequencies of specific Variable Frequency Drives (VFDs) and thus the speed of the motors connected to them, essentially sabotaging the industrial process.