this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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state actors have hacked airgapped equipment before, an actual backdoor will be ripe for exploitation.
:o how?
remember the stuxnet botnet, and how nobody knew what it was for?
turns out it was programmed to activate in the very specific conditions inside the iranian nuclear reactor facilities and sabotage it. the facility was airgapped but stuxnet was so ubiquitous in the country by then, someone just needed to bring the first usb stick in for it to be a pwn. or so goes the story.
iirc the us and israel admitted to doing it years later, it was somewhere in the obama era and they wanted to sabotage iran's nuclear program. the systems remained infected for years reporting bogus data and slightly messing with the parameters so it never worked well and their scientists remained stumped until the virus was discovered.
shows how vulnerable our systems really are to organizations with unlimited money.
Yeah... and now the Iranians have Stuxnet, too.
i'd be surprised if stuff like it werent way more common today.
So? Those backdoors have been closed since 2010 (probably earlier). Also not too many people have an Iranian Nuclear program.
The experts don't share your optimism.
Dealing with Stuxnet has probably advanced Iranian cyberwarfare capablilites by several orders of magnitude that they wouldn't have otherwise. That's the problem with using this stuff as weaponry - they don't explode.