US Blew Up Soviet Pipeline with Software Trojan Horse

William Safire tells a story in his column in the New York Times. He says that in the early 1980's, the U.S. government hid malicious code in oil-pipeline control software that the Soviet Union then stole and used to control a huge trans-Siberia pipeline. The malicious code manipulated the pipelines valves and other controls in a way that caused a huge explosion, ruining the pipeline.

After that, Safire reports, "all the software the had stolen for years was suddenly suspect, which stopped or delayed the work of thousands of worried Russian technicians and scientists."

There is some question about the source and validity of this story, but some of this is also mentioned in a CIA report: The Farewell Dossier, though it is not clear there whether it was control software or defective turbine designs that did the pipeline in.

Originally read at: Freedom to Tinker