According to a study, the creators of Stuxnet recognized that they had built the first true cyber weapon and were more interested in spreading this new type of digital warfare than in causing large-scale attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities.
In an analysis released last week, Ralph Langner, head of The Langner Group and a renowned expert in industrial control systems (ICS), refuted arguments that only a nation-state had the resources to launch a Stuxnet. Less ambitious actors could learn and implement this policy on critical infrastructure.
“While Stuxnet was clearly the work of a state, requiring enormous resources and skills, future attacks on industrial and other systems may not be,” Langner said in an article he wrote about his study in Foreign Policy magazine.
