Expert: Sweden Stands No Chance against Attack of Stuxnet Magnitude
Image: Pontus Edenberg
Sweden would never have been able to protect itself against a worm like Stuxnet, and an attack by a similarly complex malware on the kingdom’s critical infrastructure would have had devastating–even fatal–consequences, warns a cybersecurity expert.
TrueSec‘s security expert Marcus Murray told Dagens Nyheter the 1.18 megabyte virus that infected personal computers at Iran’s nuclear plant was very potent, dangerous and hard to counter.
“There are only a few businesses and parts of the [Swedish] Ministry of Defense that would have been able to protect themselves against this kind of attack,” he said, adding that there is a sense of carelessness within the Swedish IT realm, and news about computer intrusions are often suppressed.
According to TrueSec’s calculations, 90 to 95 percent of all virus- and Trojan-based attacks in Sweden today are kept under wraps. Because the number of probes is unknown, not enough action is taken to protect governments and Swedish business interests, Murray said.
“What we see in the creation of Stuxnet is a paradigm shift,” he said. “We will certainly see more of these attacks. It can be a question of sabotage, but it can also be about criminal organizations wanting to make more money, or groups wanting to hurt Sweden. We are directly connected to the other world. We are just a click away.”