IT IS 30 years since William Gibson, an American-Canadian author, wrote “Neuromancer”, in which he coined the term “cyberspace” and imagined a future of hackers for hire and giant corporations raiding each other’s computer systems in search of secrets. He was right about the direction of travel, but wrong about some of the details. For it is governments, not corporations or anti-social teenagers, who have become the world’s best hackers.The latest example came on November 23rd, when Symantec, an American antivirus firm, announced the discovery of a piece of software called Regin, which it had found lurking on computers in Russia, Saudi Arabia and several other countries, sniffing for secrets. Its sophistication and stealth led Symantec to conclude that it must have been written by a nation-state.Regin (the arbitrarily chosen name comes from a text string found in the bug’s innards) is only the latest in a long line of government-sponsored malware (see table). The most famous is Stuxnet, discovered in 2010, which was designed, almost certainly by America and Israel, to hijack industrial-control systems. It was deployed against Iran’s nuclear...
from The Economist: International http://ift.tt/1Fuv12X
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