Around this time 10 years ago, the Stuxnet worm made its global debut. Unleashed with the intent to destroy the Iranian Bushehr nuclear power plant, the sophisticated malware leveraged a multistep attack sequence that used Windows zero-day vulnerabilities and spread via USB flash drive to reach its targets. Its coding was designed to identify programmable logic controllers (PLCs) made by the manufacturing company Siemens in order to gain access to and effectively damage high-speed centrifuges — and within several months of the attack, 50,000 different Windows computers were said to have been infected along with 14 Siemens control systems.
For experts, this hack marked the dawn of a new era. Previous cybersecurity…