Alex Varanese        And some may already have it.     Alex
Varanese  Last summer their concerns became more pressing.
Researchers at a small Belorussian firm, VirusBlokAda,
discovered an advanced piece of targeted malware capable of
damaging the programmable logic controls at the heart of nuclear
plants and other critical facilities. The worm was found to be
targeting an extremely specific configuration of a common
Siemens product used in supervisory control and data acquisition
(Scada) systems that run amenities such as power plants. By
targeting components called programmable logic controllers
(PLCs) and altering their function, it could initiate
overheating and total destruction of a system, and --
potentially -- an explosion. It was named Stuxnet. The worm has
a wide range of targets, such as undiscovered vulnerabilities in
Windows (known as zero-day exploits), and rootkits (software
packages designed to allow undetected but privileged access to
systems) for both Windows and the PLCs. It can evade detect