In our current age of internet enlightenment, it’s common practice for developers, coders and other tech specialists to share the inner workings of their projects online. By allowing everyone access to the source code, people can study and improve upon each other’s ideas rather than shrouding them in a veil of secrecy and stagnation. It’s this idea that forms the basis of the “open-source” movement, which espouses the virtues of collaborative innovation.But what happens when that “innovation” involves a dangerous computer virus that has the ability to cripple — perhaps even destroy — critical industrial infrastructure?
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This is the case with Stuxnet, the mysterious computer virus that security experts have been referring to as the world’s first cyber weapon since its discovery in July 2010. And a recent lightning-rod report in The New York Times not only affirms long held suspicions that the U.S. and Israel collaborated on the revolutionary program, which caused enough damage to physically halt the enrichment of uranium at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant, but that President Obama went so far as to speed up Stuxnet attacks even after the virus leaked onto the public Internet. It's stil currently available online, making it what one might call the world’s first open-source guided missile.There’s no telling how it might now be used, or who will use it. But one thing is for certain: Stuxnet is insanely complex, perhaps the most complex computer virus ever built.Luckily, like all viruses, it has an expiration date. But even though the record-breaking twenty Zero-Day exploits the virus used have been patched, there’s still much that can be learned from a Stuxnet autopsy.Check the animation above to see what makes the virus tick, and how, thankfully, it’s going to take much more than a couple of CS majors and a case of Redbull to reverse-engineer this monster for personal use.A version of this piece originally ran on Motherboard.