Quote:Iran 'hacks software of US spy drone'

Iran has hacked the software of an advanced American spy drone which came down its territory and has begun building its own copies of the aircraft, officials claimed

22 Apr 2012 Daily Telegraph

Tehran said it had decoded hard drives and databases on board the RQ-170 Sentinel, in an announcement which increased fears Russia and China would also soon gain access to the top secret technology.

Brig Gen Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps aerospace forces, gave details of the aircraft's operational history as proof that engineers had successfully probed its records.

He said the drone had flown over Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan a fortnight before the al-Qaeda chief had been killed in an American special forces raid.

It had flown in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan, in November 2010 before suffering technical difficulties and being sent for tests on its sensors to an airfield near Los Angeles.

"Had we not accessed the plane's soft wares and hard discs, we wouldn't have been able to achieve these facts," he told the Fars news agency.

The Tehran-based Mehr news agency added that Iran had "started manufacturing models of the captured US spy plane", but gave no more details.

The aircraft, which is supposedly the CIA's unseen "eye in the sky", can carry a payload of advanced sensors capable of beaming back a trove of imagery and electronic intercepts.

Analysts believe Iran, China and Russia are also particularly interested in the stealth technology and wing coating materials which allow it to escape radar detection.

The unarmed drone was paraded on Iranian state television, apparently looking intact, after coming down 140 miles inside Iran's eastern border in December.

Tehran said it had been brought down by electronic attack after taking off from an American base inside Afghanistan.

America acknowledged the loss of the aircraft, but said it was more likely to have crashed through malfunction.

Analysts suggested at the time that data encryption, self-destruct mechanisms and damage sustained during the crash could all make it impossible for Iranian engineers to use or reverse engineer the technology.

Quote:Iranian oil ministry hit by cyber-attack

Iran's main oil export terminal is cut off from internet after apparent attack on website and communications systems

Saeed Kamali Dehghan

guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 April 2012 17.10 BST

Iran's oil ministry has called a crisis meeting after its main website and internal communications system were hit by an apparent cyber-attack that forced authorities to cut off the country's oil export terminal from the internet.

Local news agencies reported on Monday that a virus had struck the computer and communication systems of Iran's main oil export facilities on Kharg Island as well as the internal network and the websites of its oil ministry and subsidiary organisations.

The semi-official Mehr news agency quoted ministry officials as saying an investigation was under way. "We are making plans to neutralise this cyber-attack," said the deputy oil minister in charge of civil defence, Hamdollah Mohammadnejad.

The Kharg Island oil terminal, which exports 80% of the country's daily 2.2m barrels, was hit by the virus, along with terminals on the islands of Gheshm and Kish.

Officials told Mehr that disconnecting the ministry from the global internet was a precautionary move to protect its main services and denied it was taken offline because of damage caused by the virus. Among services provided by the ministry's website are fuel cards, which millions of Iranians use on a daily basis to buy petrol for cars.

No individual or group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack and the motives behind it are still unknown, but other Iranian energy sectors have also been targeted by similar cyberstrikes in recent years.

In 2010 a computer worm called Stuxnet, which was believed to have been designed to sabotage the country's enrichment of uranium, hit many Iranian nuclear sites.

Unlike this time, officials initially denied nuclear facilities had been infected by Stuxnet but later admitted it had happened, claiming they had neutralised it before it inflicted any damage.

Iranian officials accuse the west, the US and Israel in particular, of being behind a covert campaign to stop Iran from advancing in its nuclear activities by using cyber-attacks and murdering its nuclear scientists, four of whom have been killed in the past two years.

Iran's response to the cyber-attacks has been to work on a countrywide network project, called national internet, whose primary aim is to protect Iranian military, banking and sensitive data from the outside world but also aims to be a substitute for the world wide web for ordinary users. The plan, which has not been launched yet, has drawn a great deal of criticism among Iranian web users.

An Iranian IT expert involved in Iran's national internet project, who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity earlier this year, said: "Iran has fears of an outside cyber-attack like that of the Stuxnet, and is trying to protect its sensitive data from being accessible on the internet [by creating a secure intranet]."

Quote:Iran has enough uranium for five nuclear weapons, claims US thinktank

Institute for Science and International Security says uranium output up by a third but needs more refining for use in bombs

Damien Pearse and agencies

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 26 May 2012 11.03 BST


Iran has significantly increased its output of low-enriched uranium and if it was further refined could make at at least five nuclear weapons, according to a US thinktank.

The Institute for Science and International Security, which tracks Iran's nuclear programme, made the analysis on the basis of data in the latest quarterly report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The UN watchdog's report, published on Friday, showed Iran pressing ahead with its uranium enrichment work in defiance of UN resolutions calling on it to suspend the activity.

It said Iran had produced almost 6.2 tonnes of uranium enriched to a level of 3.5% since it began the work in 2007 some of which has subsequently been further processed into higher-grade material.

This equates to nearly 750 kg more than in the previous IAEA report issued in February, and the thinktank said Iran's monthly production had risen by roughly a third.

"This total amount of 3.5% low enriched uranium hexafluoride, if further enriched to weapon grade, is enough to make over five nuclear weapons," its analysis said.

But the thinktank added that some of Iran's higher-grade uranium had been converted into reactor fuel and would not be available for nuclear weapons, at least not quickly.

Enriched uranium can be used to fuel power plants, which is Iran's stated purpose, or to provide material for bombs, if refined to a much higher degree. The west suspects that may be Iran's ultimate goal despite the Islamic Republic's denials.

Iran began enriching uranium to a fissile concentration of 20% in 2010, saying it needed this to fuel a medical research reactor. It later expanded the work sharply by launching enrichment at an underground site, Fordow.

It alarmed a suspicious west since such enhanced enrichment accomplishes much of the technical leap towards 90% or weapons-grade uranium.

The IAEA report said Iran had added another 350 enrichment centrifuges to the existing 700 at Fordow, which is buried deep under rock and soil to protect it against any enemy attacks.

Although not yet being fed with uranium, the new machines could be used to further boost Iran's output of uranium enriched to 20%.

The Institute for Science and International Security said Iran still appeared to be experiencing problems in its testing of production-scale units of more advanced centrifuges that would allow it to refine uranium faster, even though it had made some progress.

Quote:David Albright is the chairperson of ISIS. He is involved in the Iraq Policy Information Project, the National Committee on North Korea and the Task Force on US Korea Policy.

Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, wrote an extensive critique of Albright's posturing for the media on nuclear issues. Ritter writes[1]:
I bring up this history because during the entire time of my intense, somewhat intimate cooperation with the IAEA Action Team, one name that never entered into the mix was David Albright. Albright is the president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS, an institute which he himself founded), and has for some time now dominated the news as the "go-to" guy for the U.S. mainstream media when they need "expert opinion" on news pertaining to nuclear issues. Most recently, Albright could be seen commenting on a report he authored, released by ISIS on June 16, in which he discusses the alleged existence of a computer owned by Swiss-based businessmen who were involved in the A.Q. Khan nuclear black market ring. According to Albright, this computer contained sensitive design drawings of a small, sophisticated nuclear warhead which, he speculates, could fit on a missile delivery system such as that possessed by Iran. I have no objection to an academically based think tank capable of producing sound analysis about the myriad nuclear-based threats the world faces today. But David Albright has a track record of making half-baked analyses derived from questionable sources seem mainstream. He breathes false legitimacy into these factually challenged stories by cloaking himself in a résumé which is disingenuous in the extreme. Eventually, one must begin to question the motives of Albright and ISIS. No self-respecting think tank would allow itself to be used in such an egregious manner. The fact that ISIS is a creation of Albright himself, and as such operates as a mirror image of its founder and president, only underscores the concerns raised when an individual lacking in any demonstrable foundation of expertise has installed himself into the mainstream media in a manner that corrupts the public discourse and debate by propagating factually incorrect, illogical and misleading information. In his résumé Albright prominently advertises himself as a "former U.N. weapons inspector." Indeed, this is the first thing that is mentioned when he describes himself to the public. Witness an Op-Ed piece in The Washington Post which he jointly authored with Jacqueline Shire in January 2008, wherein he is described as such: "David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector, is president of the Institute for Science and International Security." His erstwhile U.N. credentials appear before his actual job title. Now, this is not uncommon. I do the same thing when describing myself, noting that I was a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. I feel comfortable doing this, because it's true and because my résumé is relevant to my writing. In his official ISIS biography, Albright details his "U.N. inspector" experience as such: "Albright cooperated actively with the IAEA Action Team from 1992 until 1997, focusing on analyses of Iraqi documents and past procurement activities. In June 1996, he was the first non-governmental inspector of the Iraqi nuclear program. On this inspection mission, Albright questioned members of Iraq's former uranium enrichment programs about their statements in Iraq's draft Full, Final, and Complete Declaration." Now, as I have explained previously, I cooperated actively between 1992 and 1998 with the IAEA Action team, covering the same ground that David Albright claims to have. I do not doubt his assertion that he was in contact with the IAEA during the period claimed; I just doubt the use of the word actively to describe this cooperation. Maybe Albright was part of a top-secret "shadow" inspection activity that I was unaware of. I strongly doubt this. In 1992, when Albright states he began his "active cooperation" with the IAEA, he was serving as a "Senior Staff Scientist" with the Federation of American Scientists. That same year Albright, in collaboration with Frans Berkhout of Sussex University and William Walker of the University of St. Andrews, published "World Inventory of Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium," 1992 (SIPRI and Oxford University Press). From March 1991 until July 1992, Albright, together with Mark Hibbs, wrote a series of seven articles on the Iraqi nuclear weapons programs for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The final three articles of this series, entitled "Iraq's Bomb: Blueprints and Artifacts," "Iraq: It's all over at Al Atheer" and "Iraq's shop-till-you-drop nuclear program," were in part based upon information provided to Albright and Hibbs by the IAEA in response to questions posed by the two authors. So far as I can tell, this is the true nature of David Albright's "active cooperation." Far from being a subject-matter expert brought in by the IAEA to review Iraqi documents, Albright was simply an outsider with questions.
...
I was in Iraq at the time, spearheading the very controversial UNSCOM 150 inspection, which found our team barred from entering several sensitive sites in and around Baghdad. On the few occasions when I was able to spend some down time at the U.N. headquarters on Canal Street, I would catch up with the status of the other inspections taking place in Iraq at the same time, including the one Albright was attached to. From all accounts, his lone stint as an inspector was at best unremarkable. He was a dilettante in every sense of the word, a Walter Mitty-like character in a world of genuine U.N. inspectors. There was recognition among most involved that bringing an outsider such as David Albright into the inspection process was a mistake. Not only did he lack any experience in the nuclear weapons field (being an outsider with only secondhand insight into limited aspects of the Iraqi program), he had no credibility with the Iraqi nuclear scientists, and his questions, void of any connectivity with the considerable record of interaction between the IAEA and Iraq, were not taken seriously by either side. Albright left Iraq in June 1996, and was never again invited back. This is the reality of the relationship between Albright and the IAEA, and the singular event in his life which he uses as the justification for prominently promoting himself as a "former U.N. inspector." While not outright fraud, Albright's self-promoted relationship with the IAEA, and his status as a "former U.N. inspector," is at best disingenuous, all the more so since he exploits this misleading biographical data in his ongoing effort to insert himself into the public eye as a nuclear weapons expert, a title not supported by anything in his life experience

Quote:Iran has enough uranium for five nuclear weapons....

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