Richard Clarke on Smithsonian.com - Who was behind Stuxnet?

The article, on Stuxnet and its escape into the wild:

But you now have it, and if you’re a computer whiz you can take it apart and you can say, ‘Oh, let’s change this over here, let’s change that over there.’ Now I’ve got a really sophisticated weapon. So thousands of people around the world have it and are playing with it. And if I’m right, the best cyberweapon the United States has ever developed, it then gave the world for free.

Also impressive is that this article points out Clarke’s interest in backdoored hardware - almost all our hardware is manufactured in China, which is an enemy nation. It is likely there are vast numbers of backdoors and illicit entrypoints placed in the processors and other “chips” that make up the various computer systems that we entrust our businesses, finance systems and governments to every day. This should be the concern of every western company and government interested in protecting itself. On corporate espionage:

My greatest fear,” Clarke says, “is that, rather than having a cyber-Pearl Harbor event, we will instead have this death of a thousand cuts. Where we lose our competitiveness by having all of our research and development stolen by the Chinese. And we never really see the single event that makes us do something about it. That it’s always just below our pain threshold. That company after company in the United States spends millions, hundreds of millions, in some cases billions of dollars on R&D and that information goes free to China….After a while you can’t compete.

Really good read. Link below. www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Richard-Clarke-on-Who-Was-Behind-the-Stuxnet-Attack.html