Stuxnet taking down Iran nuclear sites

Started by rmstock, September 28, 2010, 10:45:42 AM

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rmstock

News Analysis
A Silent Attack, but Not a Subtle One

"Iran's Natanz nuclear enrichment site is the focus of speculation about the intended target of a broad and unsubtle cyberattack. "

By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: September 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/techn ... .html?_r=1


Stuxnet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

QuoteFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

Stuxnet is a Windows-specific computer worm first discovered in June 2010 by VirusBlokAda, a security firm based in Belarus. It is notable because it is the first discovered worm that spies on and reprograms industrial systems.[1] It was specifically written to attack Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems used to control and monitor industrial processes.[2] Stuxnet includes the capability to reprogram the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and hide the changes.[3]

It is the first-ever computer worm to include a PLC rootkit.[4] It is also believed to be the first worm to target critical industrial infrastructure.[5]

Speculations about the target and origin

Alan Bentley of security firm Lumension has said that Stuxnet is "the most refined piece of malware ever discovered ... mischief or financial reward wasn't its purpose, it was aimed right at the heart of a critical infrastructure". Symantec estimates that the group developing Stuxnet would have been well-funded, consisting of five to ten people, and would have taken six months to prepare.[15]

The Guardian, the BBC and The New York Times all reported that experts studying Stuxnet considered that the complexity of the code indicates that only a nation state would have the capabilities to produce it.[8][15][16] Israel has been speculated to be the country behind Stuxnet in many of the media reports[15][17][18] and by experts such as Richard Falkenrath, former Senior Director for Policy and Plans within the Office of Homeland Security[19] and there has also been speculation on the involvement of NATO, the United States and other Western nations.[20]

Symantec claims that the majority of infected systems were in Iran (about 60%),[21] which has led to speculation that it may have been deliberately targeting "high-value infrastructure" in Iran[8] including either the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant or the Natanz nuclear facility.[9] Ralph Langner, a German cyber-security researcher, called the malware "a one-shot weapon" and said that the intended target was probably hit,[22] although he admitted this was speculation.[9]

Stuxnet targets not only nuclear facilities but a variety of SCADA-based environments, including non-nuclear power generation and transmission facilities, oil refineries, chemical plants, water management facilities, and factories.


Warning over 'Stuxnet' computer worm

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/09 ... index.html


So Israel is most probable behind the infection of the Iranian Nculear Facilities. A organisation which does such things
is Unit 8200 , the tech dept. of the IDF :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200

Technology
The Unit
Gil Kerbs 02.08.07, 6:00 AM ET
http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/07/israel ... srael.html

QuoteTEL AVIV -

Harvard, Wharton and Stanford alumni consistently head the charts of executive leaders, though, on a purely academic basis, others like the University of Chicago's business school rank as high or higher. Not only are elite university graduates better paid--they'll usually have an easier time finding a job and are by and large recruited by alumni of their own alma mater.

In Israel, on the other hand, one's academic past is somehow less important than the military past. One of the questions asked in every job interview is: Where did you serve in the army?

Israeli "networks" are often based on relationships from the army service ("he and I ate from the same mess tin ... " or "you can count on me brother, after all, we slept in the same boot camp tent ... "). In Israel, graduates of elite units are held at higher esteem and gain preferred terms in the business world. But when it comes to high-tech jobs, nothing can help you more than the sentence, "I'm an 8200 alumnus."

Unit 8200 is the technology intel unit of the Israeli Defense Forces' Intelligence Corps. And one thing about it is clear to all--Israel's high-tech world is "flooded" with Unit alumni, as entrepreneurs and company founders or junior and senior executives. For full disclosure, I served as an officer in the Unit and today I work as an adviser in the venture capital industry, specializing in penetrating China and in high technology.

But Unit members can be found in a host of top Israeli businesses. Check Point, ICQ, Nice, AudioCodes (nasdaq: AUDC - news - people ) and Gilat are just a handful of the companies founded by those who came from the Unit. Gil Shwed, Yoel Gat and Shlomo Dovrat are but a few famous alumni. And 8200 alumni, like American university alumni, are interested in co-workers who resemble themselves.

Retired Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of Unit 8200 and current consultant to high-tech companies, explains that many areas of Israeli high tech would have been fundamentally weaker were it not for technologies that came from 8200.

"Take Nice, Comverse and Check Point for example, three of the largest high-tech companies, which were all directly influenced by 8200 technology," says Gefen. "Check Point was founded by Unit alumni. Comverse's main product, the Logger, is based on the Unit's technology. Look at Metacafe, one of the hottest companies today. Eyal Herzog, one of the founders, is also an 8200 alumnus and he accumulated a huge amount of relevant experience in the Unit."

"I think there's an axiomatic assumption that Unit alumni are people who bring with them very high personal and intellectual ability," says retired Brig. Gen. Yair Cohen, the previous Unit commander and current vice president of Elron, who believes that Unit alumni prefer that other Unit alumni work under them. "They have a common background, and they know that 8200 has the privilege of sorting, choosing and selecting the best group so that you don't have to invest so much in the selection yourself. I myself, after I came to Elron, brought five additional alumni with me."

Cohen can also explain why this recruiting tactic works so well. "Just genius isn't enough," he says. "The Unit understood it needed people who are also human beings: on the one hand, capable of working in a team, and on the other hand, won't loose the sparkle or the ability to be outstanding--and that's what we began searching for and bringing in. This combination of personality, behavior and values along with high intellectual ability is critical in the industry, and that, I think, is the secret of the Unit alumni's success."

"There are job offers on the Internet and wanted ads that specifically say 'meant for 8200 alumni,' says Ziv, a Unit alumnus. "So it doesn't really matter what you did in the unit--you've already benefited. It simply raises your shares in the civilian market."

The Alumni Association of Unit 8200 decided recently to take the integration of its alumni into high tech one step further. Last month, an alumni conference was held at the Unit's headquarters located in the center of the country. The goal was to strengthen the social network among the Unit alumni.

In Israel, there has been an abundance of alumni organizations of military units for years. The novelty for the 8200 was the decision not to focus on perpetuating the memory of the fallen, or on nostalgia for past glory, but to leverage the group for business development including an Internet site, similar to linkedin.com, for networking.

At the January gathering, one Unit alumnus who now works at Check Point looked around him. "It looks like there are many lieutenant colonels here from the Unit who came mainly to find work after their discharge," he grinned.

Retired Col. Nir Lampert, chairman of the 8200 Alumni Association, former Unit deputy commander and current CEO of Dapei Zahav group, explained that "we've decided to update the objectives of the Alumni Association." Now, the Unit's alumni network will help graduates find a job, investment capital or recruit new talent for a corporation.

"I see the acceptance into the Unit as a changing point in my life, an opportunity I feel has been given to me," says Tal, who was a technician in the Unit and today studies electrical engineering at the Technion--the MIT of Israel. "When someone puts it into your head that you can do anything and that everything is just a matter of time, you begin to believe it."

Tal offered to compare engineering teams in the U.S. and Israel: "In the U.S., they have several times more budget and manpower. The average engineer there is much older, with many years of experience and lots of advanced degrees. Theoretically, it sounds like we have no chance to compete and be relevant. How can a bunch of children with no degree and several soldier-students with a degree but no experience succeed in accomplishing anything?

"Turns out we are successful. Flexible thinking is our advantage. For some positions, there's a huge advantage to 18-year-old children who think they know everything--or, more precisely, who have been told time and again that no mission is too difficult for them. Take 10 of the smartest academics and they won't be able to do half the work my team does."

Unit members are taught that there's no such thing as "impossible," while "no" is something temporary that can change by persistence and insistence, even if it's the Unit commander himself who said "no."

"I think the uniqueness of Unit alumni is that if you are a small screw or have just arrived at a company two weeks ago, you still behave as if you're management. Unit alumni aren't afraid to contribute ideas and make suggestions--they're always 'big heads' even if it's their first day on the job," sums it up an alumnus who serves today as CEO of a large Israeli investment fund.

"The Unit was a home for me. In addition, it's an amazing hotbed for the best brains in the state of Israel," says another conference attendee, Minister of Tourism Issac (Buji) Herzog, a Unit alumnus. "And the truth is that's also where I met my wife."

In the past, the Ministry of Defense did try to check the drain of top engineers from the Unit to the private sector, taking with them to companies like ICQ or Check Point concepts that may have begun in the military. "In my opinion, the only criteria should be whether or not it exposes the Units' capabilities or is a threat to national security," says Gefen, a former Unit commander. "As for exposing capabilities, the Unit's people have been commendably responsible. People worked on sensitive projects and knew to identify the boundaries."

"Moreover," says Yair Cohen, another former unit commander, "there's a decisive contribution here to the economy of the State of Israel. Although 8200 doesn't directly enjoy the fruits, the State of Israel does, and in my opinion that's a complementary part of the Unit's task."

Originally published in the February issue of Forbes Israel.

``I hope that the fair, and, I may say certain prospects of success will not induce us to relax.''
-- Lieutenant General George Washington, commander-in-chief to
   Major General Israel Putnam,
   Head-Quarters, Valley Forge, 5 May, 1778

rmstock

The stuxnet worm has severely harmed nuclear installations in Iran. Maybe not physically direct, but
enough to have security regulations intervene and shutdown Nuclear facilities until everything
has been sorted out. The strange thing is that NONE of the European Nuclear powerplants
have been shutdown until further notice ......

Computer worm attacking Iran's nuclear facilities 'includes Biblical link to Israel'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... srael.html


Disruption: The Stuxnet computer worm, which appears to have been designed to target Iran's nuclear facilities, has been linked to Israel

Russian experts flee Iran, escape dragnet for cyber worm smugglers
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report October 3, 2010, 1:13 PM (GMT+02:00)
http://www.debka.com/article/9061/

Haaretz's Melman Suspects Israeli Involvement in Stuxnet
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun ... n-stuxnet/

``I hope that the fair, and, I may say certain prospects of success will not induce us to relax.''
-- Lieutenant General George Washington, commander-in-chief to
   Major General Israel Putnam,
   Head-Quarters, Valley Forge, 5 May, 1778

rmstock

Official Dutch media takes the stuxnet virus very serious and report
that Mossad is most probable behind it  :

Het gevaar van Stuxnet
http://nieuwsuur.nl/video/190342-het-ge ... uxnet.html

Iran getroffen door computervirus Stuxnet
http://nos.nl/audio/186864-iran-getroff ... uxnet.html

``I hope that the fair, and, I may say certain prospects of success will not induce us to relax.''
-- Lieutenant General George Washington, commander-in-chief to
   Major General Israel Putnam,
   Head-Quarters, Valley Forge, 5 May, 1778

rmstock

- TOP NEWS -
Israel Tests on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world ... uxnet.html
Operations at Israel's Dimona complex are among the
strongest clues that the Stuxnet computer worm was an
American-Israeli project to sabotage the Iranian nuclear
program.


By WILLIAM J. BROAD, JOHN MARKOFF and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: January 15, 2011

This article is by William J. Broad, John Markoff and David E. Sanger.


Nicholas Roberts for The New York Times
Ralph Langner, an independent computer security expert, solved Stuxnet.

    The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily
    guarded heart of Israels never-acknowledged nuclear arms program,
    where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal.

    Over the past two years, according to intelligence and military
    experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on a new,
    equally secret role  as a critical testing ground in a joint
    American and Israeli effort to undermine Irans efforts to make a
    bomb of its own.

    Behind Dimonas barbed wire, the experts say, Israel has spun
    nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Irans at Natanz, where
    Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium. They say
    Dimona tested the effectiveness of the Stuxnet computer worm, a
    destructive program that appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth
    of Irans nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy,
    Tehrans ability to make its first nuclear arms.

    To check out the worm, you have to know the machines, said an
    American expert on nuclear intelligence. The reason the worm has
    been effective is that the Israelis tried it out.

    Though American and Israeli officials refuse to talk publicly about
    what goes on at Dimona, the operations there, as well as related
    efforts in the United States, are among the newest and strongest
    clues suggesting that the virus was designed as an American-Israeli
    project to sabotage the Iranian program.

    In recent days, the retiring chief of Israels Mossad intelligence
    agency, Meir Dagan, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
    separately announced that they believed Irans efforts had been set
    back by several years. Mrs. Clinton cited American-led sanctions,
    which have hurt Irans ability to buy components and do business
    around the world.

    The gruff Mr. Dagan, whose organization has been accused by Iran of
    being behind the deaths of several Iranian scientists, told the
    Israeli Knesset in recent days that Iran had run into technological
    difficulties that could delay a bomb until 2015. That represented a
    sharp reversal from Israels long-held argument that Iran was on the
    cusp of success.

    The biggest single factor in putting time on the nuclear clock
    appears to be Stuxnet, the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever
    deployed.

    In interviews over the past three months in the United States and
    Europe, experts who have picked apart the computer worm describe it
    as far more complex  and ingenious  than anything they had imagined
    when it began circulating around the world, unexplained, in
    mid-2009.

    Many mysteries remain, chief among them, exactly who constructed a
    computer worm that appears to have several authors on several
    continents. But the digital trail is littered with intriguing bits
    of evidence.

In early 2008 the German company Siemens cooperated with one of the
United States premier national laboratories, in Idaho, to identify
the vulnerabilities of computer controllers that the company sells
to operate industrial machinery around the world  and that American
intelligence agencies have identified as key equipment in Irans
enrichment facilities.


Seimens says that program was part of routine efforts to secure its
products against cyberattacks. Nonetheless, it gave the Idaho
National Laboratory  which is part of the Energy Department,
responsible for Americas nuclear arms  the chance to identify
well-hidden holes in the Siemens systems that were exploited the
next year by Stuxnet.


The worm itself now appears to have included two major components.
One was designed to send Irans nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly
out of control. Another seems right out of the movies: The computer
program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the
nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant
operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so
that it would appear that everything was operating normally while
the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.

The attacks were not fully successful: Some parts of Irans
operations ground to a halt, while others survived, according to
the reports of international nuclear inspectors. Nor is it clear
the attacks are over: Some experts who have examined the code
believe it contains the seeds for yet more versions and assaults.

Its like a playbook, said Ralph Langner, an independent computer
security expert in Hamburg, Germany, who was among the first to
decode Stuxnet. Anyone who looks at it carefully can build
something like it. Mr. Langner is among the experts who expressed
fear that the attack had legitimized a new form of industrial
warfare, one to which the United States is also highly vulnerable.

Officially, neither American nor Israeli officials will even utter
the name of the malicious computer program, much less describe any
role in designing it.

But Israeli officials grin widely when asked about its effects. Mr.
Obamas chief strategist for combating weapons of mass destruction,
Gary Samore, sidestepped a Stuxnet question at a recent conference
about Iran, but added with a smile: Im glad to hear they are having
troubles with their centrifuge machines, and the U.S. and its
allies are doing everything we can to make it more complicated.

In recent days, American officials who spoke on the condition of
anonymity have said in interviews that they believe Irans setbacks
have been underreported. That may explain why Mrs. Clinton provided
her public assessment while traveling in the Middle East last week.

By the accounts of a number of computer scientists, nuclear
enrichment experts and former officials, the covert race to create
Stuxnet was a joint project between the Americans and the Israelis,
with some help, knowing or unknowing, from the Germans and the
British.

The projects political origins can be found in the last months of
the Bush administration. In January 2009, The New York Times
reported that Mr. Bush authorized a covert program to undermine the
electrical and computer systems around Natanz, Irans major
enrichment center. President Obama, first briefed on the program
even before taking office, sped it up, according to officials
familiar with the administrations Iran strategy. So did the
Israelis, other officials said. Israel has long been seeking a way
to cripple Irans capability without triggering the opprobrium, or
the war, that might follow an overt military strike of the kind
they conducted against nuclear facilities in Iraq in 1981 and Syria
in 2007.

Two years ago, when Israel still thought its only solution was a
military one and approached Mr. Bush for the bunker-busting bombs
and other equipment it believed it would need for an air attack,
its officials told the White House that such a strike would set
back Irans programs by roughly three years. Its request was turned
down.

Now, Mr. Dagans statement suggests that Israel believes it has
gained at least that much time, without mounting an attack. So does
the Obama administration.

For years, Washingtons approach to Tehrans program has been one of
attempting to put time on the clock, a senior administration
official said, even while refusing to discuss Stuxnet. And now, we
have a bit more.

Finding Weaknesses

Paranoia helped, as it turns out.

Years before the worm hit Iran, Washington had become deeply
worried about the vulnerability of the millions of computers that
run everything in the United States from bank transactions to the
power grid.

Computers known as controllers run all kinds of industrial
machinery. By early 2008, the Department of Homeland Security had
teamed up with the Idaho National Laboratory to study a widely used
Siemens controller known as P.C.S.-7, for Process Control System 7.

Its complex software, called Step 7, can run whole symphonies of
industrial instruments, sensors and machines.

The vulnerability of the controller to cyberattack was an open
secret. In July 2008, the Idaho lab and Siemens teamed up on a
PowerPoint presentation on the controllers vulnerabilities that was
made to a conference in Chicago at Navy Pier, a top tourist
attraction.

Goal is for attacker to gain control, the July paper said in
describing the many kinds of maneuvers that could exploit system
holes. The paper was 62 pages long, including pictures of the
controllers as they were examined and tested in Idaho.

In a statement on Friday, the Idaho National Laboratory confirmed
that it formed a partnership with Siemens but said it was one of
many with manufacturers to identify cybervulnerabilities. It argued
that the report did not detail specific flaws that attackers could
exploit. But it also said it could not comment on the laboratorys
classified missions, leaving unanswered the question of whether it
passed what it learned about the Siemens systems to other parts of
the nations intelligence apparatus.

The presentation at the Chicago conference, which recently
disappeared from a Siemens Web site, never discussed specific
places where the machines were used.

But Washington knew. The controllers were critical to operations at
Natanz, a sprawling enrichment site in the desert. If you look for
the weak links in the system, said one former American official,
this one jumps out.

Controllers, and the electrical regulators they run, became a focus
of sanctions efforts. The trove of State Department cables made
public by WikiLeaks describes urgent efforts in April 2009 to stop
a shipment of Siemens controllers, contained in 111 boxes at the
port of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. They were headed for
Iran, one cable said, and were meant to control uranium enrichment
cascades  the term for groups of spinning centrifuges.

Subsequent cables showed that the United Arab Emirates blocked the
transfer of the Siemens computers across the Strait of Hormuz to
Bandar Abbas, a major Iranian port.

Only months later, in June, Stuxnet began to pop up around the
globe. The Symantec Corporation, a maker of computer security
software and services based in Silicon Valley, snared it in a
global malware collection system. The worm hit primarily inside
Iran, Symantec reported, but also in time appeared in India,
Indonesia and other countries.

But unlike most malware, it seemed to be doing little harm. It did
not slow computer networks or wreak general havoc.

That deepened the mystery.

A Dual Warhead

No one was more intrigued than Mr. Langner, a former psychologist
who runs a small computer security company in a suburb of Hamburg.
Eager to design protective software for his clients, he had his
five employees focus on picking apart the code and running it on
the series of Siemens controllers neatly stacked in racks, their
lights blinking.

He quickly discovered that the worm only kicked into gear when it
detected the presence of a specific configuration of controllers,
running a set of processes that appear to exist only in a
centrifuge plant. The attackers took great care to make sure that
only their designated targets were hit, he said. It was a marksmans
job.

For example, one small section of the code appears designed to send
commands to 984 machines linked together.

Curiously, when international inspectors visited Natanz in late
2009, they found that the Iranians had taken out of service a total
of exactly 984 machines that had been running the previous summer.

But as Mr. Langner kept peeling back the layers, he found more  
what he calls the dual warhead. One part of the program is designed
to lie dormant for long periods, then speed up the machines so that
the spinning rotors in the centrifuges wobble and then destroy
themselves. Another part, called a man in the middle in the
computer world, sends out those false sensor signals to make the
system believe everything is running smoothly. That prevents a
safety system from kicking in, which would shut down the plant
before it could self-destruct.

Code analysis makes it clear that Stuxnet is not about sending a
message or proving a concept, Mr. Langner later wrote. It is about
destroying its targets with utmost determination in military style.

This was not the work of hackers, he quickly concluded. It had to
be the work of someone who knew his way around the specific quirks
of the Siemens controllers and had an intimate understanding of
exactly how the Iranians had designed their enrichment operations.

In fact, the Americans and the Israelis had a pretty good idea.

Testing the Worm

Perhaps the most secretive part of the Stuxnet story centers on how
the theory of cyberdestruction was tested on enrichment machines to
make sure the malicious software did its intended job.


B.K.Bangash/Associated Press
Abdul Qadeer Khan

The account starts in the Netherlands. In the 1970s, the Dutch
designed a tall, thin machine for enriching uranium. As is well
known,A. Q. Khan, a Pakistani metallurgist working for the Dutch,
stole the design and in 1976 fled to Pakistan.

The resulting machine, known as the P-1, for Pakistans
first-generation centrifuge, helped the country get the bomb. And
when Dr. Khan later founded an atomic black market, he illegally
sold P-1s to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.

The P-1 is more than six feet tall. Inside, a rotor of aluminum
spins uranium gas to blinding speeds, slowly concentrating the rare
part of the uranium that can fuel reactors and bombs.

How and when Israel obtained this kind of first-generation
centrifuge remains unclear, whether from Europe, or the Khan
network, or by other means. But nuclear experts agree that Dimona
came to hold row upon row of spinning centrifuges.

They've long been an important part of the complex, said Avner
Cohen, author of The Worst-Kept Secret (2010), a book about the
Israeli bomb program, and a senior fellow at the Monterey Institute
of International Studies. He added that Israeli intelligence had
asked retired senior Dimona personnel to help on the Iranian issue,
and that some apparently came from the enrichment program.

I have no specific knowledge, Dr. Cohen said of Israel and the
Stuxnet worm. But I see a strong Israeli signature and think that
the centrifuge knowledge was critical.

Another clue involves the United States. It obtained a cache of
P-1s after Libya gave up its nuclear program in late 2003, and the
machines were sent to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in
Tennessee, another arm of the Energy Department.

By early 2004, a variety of federal and private nuclear experts
assembled by the Central Intelligence Agency were calling for the
United States to build a secret plant where scientists could set up
the P-1s and study their vulnerabilities. The notion of a test bed
was really pushed, a participant at the C.I.A. meeting recalled.

The resulting plant, nuclear experts said last week, may also have
played a role in Stuxnet testing.

But the United States and its allies ran into the same problem the
Iranians have grappled with: the P-1 is a balky, badly designed
machine. When the Tennessee laboratory shipped some of its P-1s to
England, in hopes of working with the British on a program of
general P-1 testing, they stumbled, according to nuclear experts.

They failed hopelessly, one recalled, saying that the machines
proved too crude and temperamental to spin properly.

Dr. Cohen said his sources told him that Israel succeeded  with
great difficulty  in mastering the centrifuge technology. And the
American expert in nuclear intelligence, who spoke on the condition
of anonymity, said the Israelis used machines of the P-1 style to
test the effectiveness of Stuxnet.

The expert added that Israel worked in collaboration with the
United States in targeting Iran, but that Washington was eager for
plausible deniability.

In November, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, broke the
country's silence about the worms impact on its enrichment program,
saying a cyberattack had caused minor problems with some of our
centrifuges. Fortunately, he added, our experts discovered it.

The most detailed portrait of the damage comes from the Institute
for Science and International Security, a private group in
Washington. Last month, it issued a lengthy Stuxnet report that
said Irans P-1 machines at Natanz suffered a series of failures in
mid- to late 2009 that culminated in technicians taking 984
machines out of action.

The report called the failures a major problem and identified
Stuxnet as the likely culprit.

Stuxnet is not the only blow to Iran. Sanctions have hurt its
effort to build more advanced (and less temperamental) centrifuges.
And last January, and again in November, two scientists who were
believed to be central to the nuclear program were killed in Tehran.

The man widely believed to be responsible for much of Irans
program, Mohsen Fakrizadeh, a college professor, has been hidden
away by the Iranians, who know he is high on the target list.

Publicly, Israeli officials make no explicit ties between Stuxnet
and Irans problems. But in recent weeks, they have given revised
and surprisingly upbeat assessments of Tehrans nuclear status.

A number of technological challenges and difficulties have beset
Irans program, Moshe Yaalon, Israels minister of strategic affairs,
told Israeli public radio late last month.

The troubles, he added, have postponed the timetable.
[/list]

A version of this article appeared in print on January 16, 2011, on
page A1 of the New York edition.

``I hope that the fair, and, I may say certain prospects of success will not induce us to relax.''
-- Lieutenant General George Washington, commander-in-chief to
   Major General Israel Putnam,
   Head-Quarters, Valley Forge, 5 May, 1778

rmstock


TEHRAN: 'Stuxnet' Computer Cyber Worm Targets Iran! CNN Reports! Sept 24, 2010
by Team TEHRRAN , Uploaded on Sep 24, 2010
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cH1v4tZCPZY
  "A piece of highly sophisticated malicious software that has infected an
   unknown number of power plants, pipelines and factories over the past
   year is the first program designed to cause serious damage in the
   physical world, security experts are warning.

   At a closed-door conference this week in Maryland, Ralph Langner, a
   German industrial controls safety expert, said Stuxnet might be
   targeting not a sector but perhaps only one plant, and he speculated
   that it could be a controversial nuclear facility in Iran.

   According to Symantec, which has been investigating the virus and plans
   to publish details of the rogue commands on Wednesday, Iran has had far
   more infections than any other country."



Stuxnet 60 Minutes
by AllThingsBeck , Published on Mar 5, 2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEjUlbmD9kQ
  "The Stuxnet virus does actual physical damage to nuclear systems in Iran"

``I hope that the fair, and, I may say certain prospects of success will not induce us to relax.''
-- Lieutenant General George Washington, commander-in-chief to
   Major General Israel Putnam,
   Head-Quarters, Valley Forge, 5 May, 1778

MikeWB

Just recently a new documentary came out on Stuxnet:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5446858/

It's amazing. Best overview of Stuxnet and cyberwarfare and attacks on Iran I've seen yet.

1) No link? Select some text from the story, right click and search for it.
2) Link to TiU threads. Bring traffic here.

rmstock

Quote from: MikeWB on September 20, 2016, 05:00:38 PM
Just recently a new documentary came out on Stuxnet:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5446858/

It's amazing. Best overview of Stuxnet and cyberwarfare and attacks on Iran I've seen yet.


Yes indeed, see the other posting here http://theinfounderground.com/smf/index.php?topic=22113.0
But what most folks don't understand is that these nasty hackers at
the NSA , the so-called press at the NYTimes and all parties involved
have been stitting on this material , i.e. unpublished Zero Day exploits,
for over four years. All apparently under orders of Obama and have no doubt
received truckloads of cash to keep silent about these. If I ever see Hayden
or Obama, i will cement their smiles on the pavement. This is not how
you treat your friends, neighbors , neighboring countries or
even countries in the Middle East for that matter.
This crap has been in play from 2010 until today. Look at what
happened over there, and We the People in the USA and Europe
can pick up the pieces, that is give entry to countless refugees.

``I hope that the fair, and, I may say certain prospects of success will not induce us to relax.''
-- Lieutenant General George Washington, commander-in-chief to
   Major General Israel Putnam,
   Head-Quarters, Valley Forge, 5 May, 1778