Abstract
The Stuxnet attack on Iranian centrifuges is a well-known example of a cyber attack, not yet a cyber war. As we read below, Stuxnet was delivered to Iran’s Natanz centrifuge factory on a memory stick, raising and lowering the rotation frequencies close to several resonant frequencies, destroying a thousand centrifuges.
The US has crossed a Rubicon in cyber space. It launched a cyber attack that has caused another nation’s sensitive equipment to be destroyed. It has legitimized that behavior. In the process it delayed the Iranian nuclear program by many months, but only by months. And, because Stuxnet escaped into the hands of hackers throughout the world, the US has also launched what is likely to be a cyber boomerang, a weapon that will someday be used to attack some of America’s own defenseless networks.
[Richard A. Clarke, former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism under four presidents, Cyber War, 2010].
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The price of a electronic storage dropped by two million: $200/Mbyte to $0.01/100-Mbyte. Moore’s law has existed for 50 years (2015–1965), which is 25 doubling periods of 2 years. This gives an increase in electronic surface density of transistors by a factor of 225 = 210 × 1010 × 25 = 1024 × 1024 × 32 = 34 million over a longer period of time.
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Hafemeister, D. (2016). Cyber Terrorism. In: Nuclear Proliferation and Terrorism in the Post-9/11 World. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25367-1_14
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