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bretg80 -> RE: Stuxnet - cyber war is here - it's not your Dad's war anymore (9/25/2010 4:52:48 AM)
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From what I've read this virus was meant to target the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran.
Frank Rieger, chief technology officer at Berlin-based security firm GSMK, thinks the more likely target in Iran was a nuclear facility in Natanz. The Bushehr reactor is designed to develop non-weapons-grade atomic energy, while the Natanz facility, a centrifuge plant, is designed to enrich uranium and presents a greater risk for producing nuclear weapons. Rieger backs this claim with a number of seeming coincidences.
The Stuxnet malware appears to have begun infecting systems in January 2009. In July of that year…WikiLeaks posted an announcement saying that an anonymous source had disclosed that a “serious” nuclear incident had recently occurred at Natanz… The site decided to publish the tip after news agencies began reporting that the head of Iran’s atomic energy organization had abruptly resigned for unknown reasons after 12 years on the job.
There’s speculation his resignation may have been due to the controversial 2009 presidential elections in Iran that sparked public protests — the head of the atomic agency had also once been deputy to the losing presidential candidate. But information published by the Federation of American Scientists in the U.S. indicates that something may indeed have occurred to Iran’s nuclear program. Statistics from 2009 show that the number of enriched centrifuges operational in Iran mysteriously declined from about 4,700 to about 3,900 beginning around the time the nuclear incident WikiLeaks mentioned would have occurred.
[Wired]
"Exactly what Stuxnet might command industrial equipment to do still isn’t known. But malware experts say it could have been designed to trigger such Hollywood-style bedlam as overloaded turbines, exploding pipelines and nuclear centrifuges spinning so fast that they break. “The true end goal of Stuxnet is cyber sabotage. It’s a cyber weapon basically,” said Roel Schouwenberg, a senior antivirus researcher at Kaspersky, a security software maker. “But how it exactly manifests in real life, I can’t say.” " [BITS website]
AND NOW THIS IN TODAY's HEADLINES
Iran would consider ending higher level uranium enrichment, the most crucial part of its controversial nuclear activities, if world powers send Tehran nuclear fuel for a medical research reactor, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told reporters Friday. [yahoo.com]
It would appear that Stuxnet worked it's magic. This is a powerful new Cyber weapon and we are entering a new age of warfare. This is the real deal guys. I'm a Computer Scientist and I can tell you that what has been accomplished here is the equivalent to the development of Radar during WW2 or decoding the Enigma code or the Japanese Naval code, and may even be the equivalent of the Atomic bomb. It is a significant event in history and it will become very apparent in the coming years. Right now people don't understand what happened, but they will. In effect, some organization may have infected a nuclear processing plant using a sophisticated attack possibly using a memory stick and destroyed the plant from the inside using software, pretty amazing. [&o]
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