Analyst's note:  I only recommend this entire article if you can read such material and still sleep at night.

"Tomorrow's wars will be fought not just with guns, but with the click of a mouse half a world away that will unleash weaponized software that could take out everything from the power grid to a chemical plant.

[....] Experts believe that Stuxnet was developed by a nation with a top-notch covert cyberweapons team, probably at a cost of millions of dollars. But now that elements of its software code – its electronic blueprint – are available on the Internet, it could be downloaded and reverse-engineered by organized crime groups, cyberweapons dealers, so-called "hactivist" organizations, rogue nations, and terrorists. The hactivist group Anonymous recently touted that it had acquired a copy of the Stuxnet code. Individual tinkerers are getting it, too.

"What Stuxnet represents is a future in which people with the funds will be able to buy a sophisticated attack like this on the black market," says Ralph Langner, a German cyber-security researcher and Stuxnet expert. "Everyone can have their own cyberweapon." He adds that Stuxnet could be modified by someone who isn't even a control-systems expert into a "digital dirty bomb" that could damage or destroy virtually any industrial operating system it targets.

Amr Thabet, an engineering student at the University of Alexandria in Egypt, typifies how easy it is to access the new world of cyberweaponry. During recent mass street protests in his country, he found time to post on his blog a portion of the Stuxnet cyberweapon he had reverse-engineered. The blog drew the attention of cybersecurity experts, who were unhappy, but not surprised, by what he had done.

"This kid's work makes Stuxnet a lot more accessible and portable to other computer architectures," says Bob Radvanovsky, an industrial control-systems expert at Infracritical, a Chicago-based computer security organization. "It's something a number of people are doing for intellectual exercise – or for malicious purposes. It's not a good trend. If a college student is trying to dabble with this, who else on the dark nets with more nefarious intentions might be [as well]?"

In an e-mail interview, Mr. Thabet said he did it largely for the thrill. He noted that he spent two months deconstructing a small but crucial part of the code after he saw all the attention surrounding the discovery of Stuxnet last fall. "It's the first time I see a malware becomes like a gun or like a weapon close a whole company in few days," he writes in broken English. "You can say [Stuxnet] makes the malware a harder challenge and more dangerous. That's maybe what inspire me.[....]"