Research Suggests Stuxnet is the first military-grade cyberweapon

Research now, is suggesting Stuxnet to be the first military grade cyberweapon constructed for different missions.

“Somewhere in the world, the creators of the Stuxnet worm are involved in a cyberweapon manufacturing operation that can pump out supersophisticated malicious software tweaked for specific missions, new targets, and detection evasion.”

Kaspersky and Symantec have been working for a little over a year now to reverse engineer Stuxnet. Both companies have unveiled a much larger family of cyber weaponry. There where seven launch files found to be similar to Stuxnet, most of the code was similar and according to Kaspersky’s study released last week. Two of those files are known to be used by the Stuxnet program. Two others are related to an espionage software program called Duqu, discovered last fall, 2011. The other three are unknown and still breeding in the wild.

The Stuxnet programmers are now using the software they crafted to carry out different missions.

“Stuxnet’s creators used a [software] platform to package and deliver it, because they wanted to be able to make many cyberweapons easily and be able to change them rapidly for targeting and attack,”

says Costin Raiu, director of the global research and analysis team at Kaspersky Labs, in a phone interview from Romania.

“We’ve done the same analysis Kaspersky has, and seen the same timelines, dates, encryption keys,” says Liam O Murchu, manager of operations for Symantec Security Response, in a phone interview. “We think Stuxnet and Duqu are made by the same team, with the same goal…. They can change [the software weapon produced on the common platform], manipulate it, have different payloads.”