"Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute, said the revelation dramatically alters the cybersecurity landscape," wrote Vijayan. "'We are now going to be the target of massive attacks,' Paller said...'for a long time everything has been under the radar, no one was really sure that the US was practicing this kind of activity. The US has acted like it was an innocent victim' of state-sponsored attacks by other countries, he said."

The damning NYT article details some pithy moments: "'Should we shut this thing down?' Mr Obama asked, according to members of the president's national security team who were in the room."

Well, no, Mr President, that's not how properly constructed military-specification computer viruses work when they're in attack-mode. You don't hit the 'Like' button on your friend Mister Antivirus to make it all go away.

Stuxnet, (ironically code-named 'Olympic Games' and initiated by the Bush administration in 2006) "was of an entirely different type and sophistication," according to the NYT. "It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country's infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives," said the article.

"Mr Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons...could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks."