With all due respect, the OP Title is misleading. It implies that the malware was activated and that the malware messed with the control system to shut down the plant. That is not so. The malware itself didn't do anything. The plant was shut temporarily down as a safety measure because of fear of the abilities of the malware. The mere fact that such malware was able to be planted within the plant's control system for possible future use is bad enough.
OK, I copied thread title from article. Sometimes titles tend to be sensationalistic to get more readers... Mods can change it if they think it should be corrected.
It is becoming increasingly apparent to me that any future major attack against the USA will be a cyber attack, terrorist or state sponsored. For example, since the late 1970's, it has been a well known "top secret" that there are several key points along the electric and gas pipeline grids where a small attack, and I do mean small, could paralyze half the country. (It was such a "top secret" that all it took was a $25 check sent to Penwalt for a map of the nation's electric and pipeline grid to discover.) It only took the Federal Government twenty years to begin the process of establishing regulations to require minimum security standards for electric power generating stations and interconnection points. Better late than never. I am not intimately familiar with what rules, if any, have been established for major gas pipeline interconnection points. And now since Stuxnet, the entry into the picture of a cyber attack against nuclear facilities, water purification stations, etc, maginifies the danger of such an attack exponentially. The media made light of the Chinese program to build a data-base of all US Citizens, without mentioning how easily that database could be "weaponized.",e.g. hack 50 million American's access to their bank accounts and watch the uncontrollable civilian unrest/riots/shutdown of our economy. There are hundreds of possible cyber attack points that could at the push of an exremist's finger throw the USA into at least total chaos. The net while a wonderful thing, has made us all, as a Nation, extremely asymetricaly vulnerable. North Korea now has a satellite in space whose orbit transverses the USA. We have no idea what, if any, payload it might carry. While the reality of the effects of an EMP attack, stil remain controversial, the presence of the North Korean sattelite is not comforting, to say the least. There are too many insanely fanatic individuals who now control groups/states with ever increasing cyber sophistication. While The Pentagon has decreed that ..."any cyberattack on the U.S. would be deemed an act of war.' ", I find that to be of little comfort. I hope that the NSA is spending an equivalent amount of resources into blocking a cyber attack as it is on violating The Fourth Amendment (Yeah, I know: "All is fair in love and war.").
It wasn't taken personally. And you said it as it was - malware didn't shut down power plant but rather power plant was shut down (by it's operators) because of malware.
What's wrong with ALL these people, in ALL those companies etc etc ? Are they stupid/lazy or ? I find it incredible they are still so insecure, & even connected to the www. ********
Sensational. As to cyber threads dating back to 70s, well, it's been some 40-45 years since, and we're fine. Mrk
