GoKawiilResearchers have long considered the Stuxnet attacks on Iran's nuclear centrifuges in Natanz to be the opening chapter of state-sponsored cyber sabotage.
As it turns out, at least five years before Stuxnet became public in 2010, somebody had developed an equally potent cyber weapon, one capable of injecting near-imperceptible errors into high-precision mathematical computations to gradually undermine and sabotage systems and applications that rely on their results.
Researchers at SentinelOne who discovered the previously undocumented malware framework, which they are tracking as fast16, say it represents the earliest example yet of a cyber tool designed explicitly for sabotaging "ultra expensive high-precision computing workloads of national importance like advanced physics, cryptographic, and nuclear research workloads."
"The discovery of fast16 rewrites our understanding of what a cyber weapon can do, as well as when nation-state cyber sabotage operations matured to the level of becoming a serious threat to critical infrastructure," says SentinelOne researcher Vitaly Kamluk in comments to Dark Reading.
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Rewriting Notions of a Cyberweapon
Fast16's function was to quietly corrupt mathematical outputs of engineering and scientific software by introducing tiny systematic errors that would be nearly impossible to detect without running independent calculations on a completely separate, uninfected system.
SentinelOne likened fast16's delivery mechanism to a "cluster munition" that could drop multiple "wormlets" which would then distribute the main payload to as many machines as possible in a target environment by looking for and exploiting vulnerabilities in them.
Fast16 marks a major turning point in the history of cyber weapons, Kamluk says. "Despite its twenty-year vintage, we have yet to discover another malware specifically designed to compromise high-precision mathematical calculations in this way."
A Fortunate Find
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