In January, Google announced that it (and many other Fortune 100 companies) had been hacked. The source of the attack that spanned about half a year was tracked back to two schools in China. The primary goal of the attack, dubbed project Aurora, was to gain access to and potentially modify source code repositories at high tech, security and defense contractor companies. In a related story, the Chinese city of Shaoxing was identified as the source of 21.3% of all (12 billion) malicious emails sent throughout the world.
Later and elsewhere in the news, a self-replicating computer program (called a worm) designed to attack and sabotage manufacturing facilities, power grids, pipelines and nuclear plants was discovered in Iran. The worm intercepts legitimate commands that control devices such as valves and pressure gauges and substitutes them with potentially destructive ones. Dubbed the Stuxnet worm, it has spread to over 100,000 machines in more than 155 countries, though most are in Iran. Experts claim “…we’ve never seen such an advanced threat that needed so many different skills to come together.” To date no-one has been able to identify the creator of this “cyber-weapon” although given that the target was almost certainly the nuclear reactors in Iran most believe it originated in the US or Israel (although it could just as easily be some evil billionaire with a cat).
Rounding out a year that saw the U.S. Coastguard protecting the privacy of British Petroleum’s effort (or lack thereof) to cleanup the mother of all oil spills, government agencies everywhere the world over were tripping over themselves in attempts to gag, smear and/or arrest WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange for his role in introducing a few barrels of declassified, “he said, she said” news leaks.