Richard Clarke on Who Was Behind theStuxnet Attack
America's longtime counterterrorism czar warns that the cyberwars have already begun
—
and that we might be losing
Smithsonian
Clarke has seen the future of war and says it will be fought by hackers.
Khue Bui
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The story Richard Clarke spins has all the suspense of a postmodern geopolitical thriller. The tale involvesa ghostly cyberworm created to attack the nuclear centrifuges of a rogue nation
which then escapes fromthe target country, replicating itself in thousands of computers throughout the world. It may be lurking in yours right now. Harmlessly inactive...or awaiting further orders. A great story, right? In fact, the world-
ent attack on Iran. And yet it might end upstarting one someday soon, if its replications are manipulated maliciously. And at the heart of the story isa mystery: Who made and launched Stuxnet in the first place?Richard Clarke tells me he knows the answer.Clarke, who served three presidents as counterterrorism czar, now operates a cybersecurity consultancy called Good Harbor, located in one of those anonymous office towers in Arlington, Virginia, thattriangulate the Pentagon and the Capitol in more ways
than one. I had come to talk to him about what’s been done since the urgent alarm he’d sounded in his recent book,
argument is that, while the United States has developed the capability to conduct an offensive cyberwar, we have virtually no
September of 2001, who tried to get the White House to act on his warnings that Al Qaeda was preparinga spectacular attack on American soil.Clarke later delivered a famous apology to the American people in his testimony to the 9/11 Commission:
As Clarke stood next to a window inserting coffee capsules into a Nespresso machine, I was reminded of the opening of one of the great espionage films of all time,
, in which Michael Cainesilently, precisely, grinds and brews his morning coffee. High-tech java seems to go with the job.
-spy, a master counterespionage,counterterrorism savant, the central node where all the most secret, stolen, security-encrypted bits of information gathered by our trillion-dollar human, electronic and satellite intelligence network eventually
- grade espionage intelligence asanyone at Langley, NSA or the White House. So I was intrigued when he chose to talk to me about themysteries of Stuxnet.
difference, however, between the kind of cyberespionage the United States government does and China.
The U.S. government doesn’t hack its way into Airbus and give Airbus the secrets to Boeing [many believethat Chinese hackers gave Boeing secrets to Airbus]. We don’t hack our way into a Chinese computer
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