Stuxnet, the malware that infiltrates Siemens plant control software and trashes it, has come to public notice since its attack on an Iranian nuclear reactor. Indeed one could say that it has become an Important Issue having been featured on the Today Programme this morning.
I listened with fascination as the two “experts” talked with great gravitas about it. Unfortunately the female professor, though articulate in that BBC way of speaking to the prols, couldn’t manage anything much more enlightening than it might be serious and showed new ways that bad people could attack in cyberspace.
Now call me old-fashioned but I happen to think that an ability to trash an oppressive and lunatic regime’s nuclear weapons facility remotely without a body count can hardly be called bad.
As I have previously blogged Stuxnet and its ilk may be the future of warfare and if that is the case then we need to plough significantly more resources into research and operations involving cyber war – particularly defending against cyber attacks-if we can do it to them they can do it to us. Probably more than buying two new aircraft carriers which already are probably vulnerable to a Stuxnet –like attack.
There is worrying evidence that the defence review is looking in the wrong place. Instead of bickering about the numbers of fast jets and special forces soldiers we should be going flat out to build our cyberwar capability at a fraction of the cost. What’s needed is brainpower not kit.
Building our defence doctrine on the assertion that “Whatever happens we have got the SAS [or Trident] and they have not” (with apologies to Hilaire Belloc) is hardly a way of future-proofing the nation.
