Stuxnet Update

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10:40 AM, Nov 23, 2010 • By JONATHAN V. LAST

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Cue Dennis Green. In the last week or so we've gotten confirmation about what the Stuxnet worm was designed to do: Blow up centrifuges.Eric Chien at Symantec has the technical details for the nerds. The NYT has the layman's report for the techno-phobes. Key takeaways:

* Just as most people guessed from the outset, the vector is a frequency converter for centrifuges manufactured in Finland and Tehran. Finland is almost certainly not the target.

* Stuxnet changes the workings of these centrifuges in small ways over a long period of time (months, not hours).

* This sabotages the workings of the centrifuges.

They are what we thought they were.