Of course, people who remember the hysteria about the “millennium bug” at the end of the last century, and the way that was supposedly going to wipe out bank accounts in 2000, may be sceptical about the real and present danger that this constitutes as an accidental problem. And Barack Obama has secretly given himself the power to authorise attacks designed to destroy computer systems governing the enemy’s telecoms, traffic, electricity and water supply – while of course cultivating a 24/7 paranoia about the enemy’s growing capability to do the same to us. Taking his cue from a pioneering investigation from David Sanger of the New York Times and documents disclosed by Edward Snowden, Gibney argues in his film that cyber-attacks are the next big thing in war, and despite official denials, it is not just a matter of “hacking” or “spying” but complete offensive capability – and as in nuclear war, the experts emphasise the American football distinctions between defence and offence. And the malware itself grew like a toxic worm, uncontrolled, infecting other systems, all over the world.Īs one interviewee puts it in Gibney’s film, there is a “whiff of August 1945” about the Natanz attack – the first chapter in a new history of warfare. At the time, the Iranian government irritably dismissed this as petty vandalism, but there is no doubt that for a while Stuxnet made Iran’s nuclear technicians look as clueless as Homer Simpson at the Springfield power plant, unable to work out what was going on.īut the Iranians had cyberwarriors on their own payroll and hit back with malware attacks on Bank of America, among other American institutions. In 2010, the Americans succeeded in installing this device at Natanz, an Iranian nuclear plant, disrupting the refinement process and causing centrifuges to spin out of control.
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