The first time a computer virus has been used as a weapon of war – and a nasty invitation for states that regard the US as the Great Satan to reply in kind even when not in a state of open warfare with the US?US News & World Report quotes two unidentified senior US officials saying that a virus was designed by the National Security Agency – one of those bodies you are not meant to know exists, even though everyone knows its headquarters are at Fort Meade, Maryland – with the aim of disabling the mainframe used to co-ordinate and control Iraq’s air defence system during the Gulf War; US intelligence agents identified a French-built printer that was to be smuggled from Amman, Jordan, to a military facility in Baghdad and the agents in Amman replaced a chip in the printer with one containing the virus – and by attacking the Iraqi computer through the printer, the virus was able to avoid detection by normal electronic security measures; the effect of the virus was to cause the contents of the display screen to vanish whenever a user tried to open a window on it.
