[kxoybmhk] Stuxnet crashes a plane into the Freedom Tower

In the not-to-distant future...

The Freedom Tower, 1776 feet tall on the World Trade Center site, has finally been completed.  It is a shining symbol of American triumph over terrorism, our ability to rebuild and look forward.  But on the day of the ribbon-cutting, with everyone watching, terrorists incredibly again fly a plane into the building, bringing it crashing down into another flaming pile of rubble and ruin like we still remember all to well.

How'd they do it?  This time, instead of a low-tech hijacking, they have employed a computer worm, buried deep inside the electronic fly-by-wire controls of a plane to wrest control from the pilot and fly it autonomously.  The worm had been implanted months if not years before, waiting until precisely this moment to activate.

But that's abso-fuckin'-lutely impossible, you exclaim.  Aircraft computers are strictly separated from the internet.  They run completely different hardware and software than normal computers.  Ah, but so did Iranian centrifuges for uranium enrichment at Natanz, the successful targets of the Stuxnet worm.

It turns out that the terrorists had used Stuxnet as a template, adapting it to attack airplane avionics instead of centrifuges.  Certainly it was no small feat (you have to precisely fly a plane!), but only made possible because Stuxnet existed first, laying down the groundwork, the techniques for infection and avoiding detection, the code for attacking physical infrastructure.

With the strong allegations that the Stuxnet code was written by our own government (or Israel's), so paid for by American taxpayer dollars, we face the horrible irony of that code now having being harnessed to murder Americans and to destroy our Freedom Tower.

And that was only the first target.