In 2012, a computer virus known as Shamoon wiped the hard drives on tens of thousands of computers belonging to Saudi Aramaco, Saudi Arabia’s oil & gas behemoth, and left a burning American flag on screens of the infected devices. It’s widely believed that attack was carried out by Iran as retaliation for the 2010 destruction of Iranian nuclear centrifuges by a computer program known as Stuxnet. Deployed by American and Israeli software experts, the Stuxnet worm was secretly authorized by President Obama to slow Iran’s nuclear progress.
Similar to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that triggered World War I, perhaps someday we’ll view Stuxnet as the catalyst that sparked the first cyber war. Admiral Michael Rodgers, an NSA director, expects a major cyber-attack against the US within the next decade, with China and “one or two” other countries capable of knocking out the electric grid and other critical infrastructure. Rodgers warned in late 2014: “It’s only a matter the ‘when,’ not the ‘if,’ we’ll see something dramatic.
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