Cyber security field experts speculate that Stuxnet, the infamous virus may have been created by a government or a well-financed group of investors, as the worm is too complex to have been developed by a single hacker. Specifically designed to attack supervisory control and data acquisition systems manufactured by German industrial giant Siemens, Stuxnet has done much of its damage in Iran and has caused many experts to question whether it was designed to sabotage the country’s nuclear facilities, according to the AFP. Officials now fear the worm is capable of targeting U.S. infrastructure.
“‘That virus focused on specific software implementations, and those software implementations did exist in some U.S. infrastructure,’ Greg Schaffer, the department’s assistant secretary for cyber security and communications, told reporters during a breakfast on Tuesday morning. ‘So, there was the potential for some U.S. infrastructure to be impacted at some level.'”
