There's a Stuxnet Copycat, and We Have No Idea Where It Came From (vice.com)

Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard: After details emerged of Stuxnet, arguably the world's first digital weapon, there were concerns that other hackers would copy its techniques. Now, researchers have disclosed a piece of industrial control systems (ICS) malware inspired heavily by Stuxnet. Although the copycat malware -- dubbed IRONGATE by cybersecurity company FireEye -- only works in a simulated environment it, like Stuxnet, replaces certain types of files, and was seemingly written to target a specific control system configuration. [...] IRONGATE works within a simulated Siemens environment called PLCSIM, used for testing programs before they are pushed out into the field. Like Stuxnet, IRONGATE replaces a Dynamic Link Library (DLL), a small collection of code that can be used by different programs at the same time, with a malicious one of its own. IRONGATE's DLL records five seconds of traffic from the Siemens' system to the user interface, and replays it over again, potentially tricking whoever is monitoring the system into thinking everything is fine, while the malware might manipulate something else in the background.Dark Reading's coverage on this is also worth a read.

Comments

We Have No Idea Where It Came From...

[__aaclcg7560]

Stack Overflow?

not worth reading

[xeno]

I got to "Stuxnet, arguably the world's first digital weapon" and hit the limit for stupid in the first sentence. No need to read further.
I could also argue that dirt is water, and it'd be just as ridiculous.

How about Buckshot Yankee in 2005, using a modified version of agent.btz that combined compromise with persistence, worm, and staging tool?
How about the automation portion of Titan Rain in 2003, that combined seeking, filtering, persisting, gathering, and moving on?
Or maybe the 2007 Sinowal/Torpig/Mebroot variants that were pretty much fully autonomous self-updating weapons once launched -- do weapons against commercial entities not count as much as weapons from or toward nation-states?
Does none of that count? Stuxnet had more self-contained payload tuned for the target environment, but less self-updating/persistence and other capabilities. So what the hell kind of n00b idiocy is "world's first digital weapon"?

FFS, if you don't know the first thing about history, please don't try to pontificate on the topic.

Re:not worth reading

[rtb61]

Technically the first digital weapons arose around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Breaking a machine generated code by other machines and used in war, hence the first examples of digital warfare. The current effort is just an example of the mass stupidity of the CIA and NSA in releasing weapons that can be readily discovered post use, and easily edited and copied and infinite number of times. Stupid is as stupid does. Those morons keep playing computer wars and the rest of us will end up with the consequences of the ultimate weapon in digital wars, electro magnetic pulses. That is the guaranteed inevitable result of the current stupid escalation.