Does computer worm "stuxnet" attack Iranian Nuclear Program?

[Ed Jewett]

The Shadow War

December 13th, 2010 Via: Newsweek:
Historically, Israel’s covert operations have been on the violent side. When it comes to strategic murders, the Mossad has established a record 50 years long of “targeted assassinations,” often taking out scientists who tried to help its enemies develop weapons of mass destruction. It has carried out hits all over the Middle East and Europe (see following story). Iran knows this history well: Israeli intelligence sources, who decline to be named on the record, coyly suggest that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are so convinced the Mossad directed the assassination plots that the Guards are taking extreme measures to protect the man considered next on the hit list: Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a professor of nuclear physics whom the Israelis sometimes call “the Iranian Dr. Strangelove.” They believe he’s directing a secret nuclear-weapons program that is distinct from the public enrichment operations at Natanz and elsewhere, which are open to United Nations inspectors. (The official Iranian government position is that all its nuclear research and all its uranium enrichment are for purely peaceful purposes.)
The real damage to the Iranian nuclear program, however, was done by Stuxnet—the most sophisticated computer worm ever detected and analyzed, one targeting hardware as well as software, and a paradigm of covert cyberweapons to come. “Stuxnet is the start of a new era,” says Stewart Baker, former general counsel of the U.S. National Security Agency. “It’s the first time we’ve actually seen a weapon created by a state to achieve a goal that you would otherwise have used multiple cruise missiles to achieve.”

[Ed Jewett]

New York Times on Stuxnet: Israelis Tested it at Dimona, Developed with Help from Seimens, Worm Sends Fake Data to Plant Operators Indicating Normal Centrifuge Operations as the Machines Destroy Themselves

January 16th, 2011 Via: New York Times:
The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel's 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 Iran's efforts to make a bomb of its own.
Behind Dimona's barbed wire, the experts say, Israel has spun nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Iran's 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 Iran's nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran's 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."
…
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 Iran's 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 America's 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 Iran's 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.
Posted in Covert Operations, Infrastructure, Technology, War

[Magda Hassan]

Kind of explains Seimens' muted response to this operation. :zzzz:

[David Guyatt]

Add to that the covert operation that assassinates Iranian nuclear scientists and Iran is put back a decade.

In which case why continue to publicly attack them for trying to make a nuclear weapon? Shades of Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction, perhaps?

[Carsten Wiethoff]

From http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_...d-stuxnet/

Ashkenazi Video Admits IDF Bombed Syrian Nuclear Reactor and Created Stuxnet

Anshel Pfeffer's Haaretz report



Haaretz has just published a story that will certainly disappear due to gag order. In it, Anshel Pfeffer writes that Gabi Ashkenazi prepared a video celebrating his achievements as chief of staff, which was screened at a party marking his final day on the job. What is extraordinary about the video is that among the successes of his time in office it credits the bombing of the Syrian nuclear reactor and the Stuxnet virus attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. Israel has never publicly acknowledged responsibility for either. So either Ashkenazi has a monumental need to amplify himself and his heroic accomplishments before he faces the glare of police klieg lights; or he's violated elemental secrecy rules regarding these two events (or both). It's possible he got approval from the censor to include this material in his video, but it seems highly unlikely. To me it seems like a monumental screw-up. But maybe Israel has finally decided to fess up.
Attendees at the party included former Mossad chief, Meir Dagan who also appeared in the video congratulating Ashkenazi for doin' a helluva job. I wonder what Dagan thought of these revelations…
Rotter, one of Israel's major online forums, where some of my work is posted and linked (and heckled) has allowed the image to the left to be published in their Scoops section, but removed two attempts to link to this post. What are they afraid of? I guess Rabbi Rotter is still a little sore at what I wrote about his son, Meir, who harrasses Sheikh Jarrah protesters regularly as a police officer in East Jerusalem.
UPDATE: Looks like I was wrong as Haaretz has posted the story online. Which goes to show that when you're the chief of staff, even a corrupt one, you can get away with a helluva lot more than when you're Anat Kamm.

[Magda Hassan]

Which goes to show that when you're the chief of staff, even a corrupt one, you can get away with a helluva lot more than when you're Anat Kamm.

Yep. Double standards of power.

[Jan Klimkowski]

From http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_...d-stuxnet/

Ashkenazi Video Admits IDF Bombed Syrian Nuclear Reactor and Created Stuxnet

Anshel Pfeffer's Haaretz report

(snip)


UPDATE: Looks like I was wrong as Haaretz has posted the story online. Which goes to show that when you're the chief of staff, even a corrupt one, you can get away with a helluva lot more than when you're Anat Kamm.

Here's a googlish translation from the Hebrew:

Posted at 12:53 14/02/11

Ashkenazi farewell ceremony: the worm Iranian Syrian reactor

By Anshel Pfeffer

Surprising video about Ashkenazi term


Stethoscope on the activities of multi - Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi included an image clip concluding his term, not skipped a summary of secret operations. Side remarks Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin of special offers, video mentioned two operations that were also a global resonance, but Israel has never taken responsibility for them.

The first operation was the attack on the Syrian nuclear reactor before three and half years. According to foreign sources, fighter planes of the Israeli Air Force attacked and destroyed a nuclear reactor built with the assistance of North Korea. The second operation was sabotage Iran's uranium enrichment facilities last year through the computer virus "Stoxnat."

Computer worm brought Losabattam of hundreds of centrifuges, and caused significant damage to the nuclear program of Iran. Even in this case assessed computer experts in the world, that the action could make only state entity, an entity with similar technological capability of Israel or the U.S..

Although two special operations were included in the film on Ashkenazi's term, but does not say a word about them from the Israeli official. Excerpts from the video were Channel 2, which raised the question: Is it Israeli action. Immediately after the section on computer virus was shown a video greeting the former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who was also the ceremony

[Jan Klimkowski]

Hmmmm......

Wired via Zero Hedge:

Did Iran Just Retaliate For Stuxnet? Computer Virus Infects US Predator Drone System

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/07/2011 14:15 -0400

It was only a matter of time: the weakest link in the otherwise awesome idea that is a remote-controlled military, represented by the thousands of Predator and Reaper drones, has always been its biggest strength: the fact that it is remote-controlled. Which means that with no person on location, the system has always been susceptible to infiltration in the form of intermediation between the offsite pilot and the actual equipment. Such as a virus. And as Wired reports, a viral infestation, the biggest nightmare for the the US drone fleet, has just struck. "A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America's Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots' every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones. The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military's Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech's computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military's most important weapons system." Well that is truly Ironic: the "western" world tried to cripple (and failed) Iran's nuclear program with Stuxnet; it will, then, be supremely ironic if Iran retaliates by maxing out the credit cards of the US Air Force logging the credit card number as pilots purchase stuff online, and uses these to buy weaponized plutonium from Russia using Uncle Sam's credit card.

More:

"We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back," says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. "We think it's benign. But we just don't know."

Ah yes, the good old "it's a benign viral infestation of a top-secret military system" excuse. It's a classic. Works everytimg too.

And more:

Military network security specialists aren't sure whether the virus and its so-called "keylogger" payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don't know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they're sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.

Drones have become America's tool of choice in both its conventional
and shadow wars, allowing U.S. forces to attack targets and spy on its
foes without risking American lives. Since President Obama assumed
office, a fleet of approximately 30 CIA-directed drones have hit targets
in Pakistan more than 230 times; all told, these drones have killed more than 2,000 suspected militants and civilians, according to the Washington Post.
More than 150 additional Predator and Reaper drones, under U.S. Air
Force control, watch over the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. American
military drones struck 92 times in Libya between mid-April and late August. And late last month, an American drone killed top terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki part of an escalating unmanned air assault in the Horn of Africa and southern Arabian peninsula.


But despite their widespread use, the drone systems are known to have
security flaws. Many Reapers and Predators don't encrypt the video they
transmit to American troops on the ground. In the summer of 2009, U.S.
forces discovered "days and days and hours and hours" of the drone footage on the laptops of Iraqi insurgents. A $26 piece of software allowed the militants to capture the video.

[Peter Lemkin]

Computer Virus Infects US Predator Drone System

No clue who did it...but whoever deserves the Nobel Peace Prize!!!!

[Carsten Wiethoff]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/...wanted=all

Just one quote:

This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts. None would allow their names to be used because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day.

Imagine what would happen, if any country tried the same on American or Israeli nuclear or military installations. Talk about double standards.