A Times exposé suggests that the White House failed to consider how our own cyberweapons would be used against us, Technology Review Mims’s Bits reports.

If the New York Times‘ comprehensive account of the birth of the STUXNET worm that slowed Iran’s efforts to enrich uranium tells us anything, it’s that the Obama administration was remarkably naive about the potential for the proliferation of the cyberweapons it was developing.

Then, in Summer 2010, an event the administration should have anticipated occurred: The STUXNET worm got loose and started replicating outside the Iranian enrichment plant that had been its target. In the wild, on the Internet, its was exposed for everyone to see.

Didn’t it occur to anyone in the room that, once unleashed, this kind of attack would mean that every piece of critical computer-controlled infrastructure in the U.S. would have to be evaluated, and forever-after upgraded, in order to defend against such an attack?