Archive for the ‘Stuxnet’ Category

HOW THE WORM TURNED – STUXNET

Friday, December 17th, 2010
Published on The Weekly Standard (www.weeklystandard.com)

Stuxnet versus the Iranian nuclear program.

Jonathan V. Last

December 13, 2010, Vol. 16, No. 13

Last week Mahmoud Ahmadinejad acknowledged that Iran’s uranium enrichment program had suffered a setback: “They were able to disable on a limited basis some of our centrifuges by software installed in electronic equipment,” the Iranian president told reporters. This was something of an understatement. Iran’s uranium enrichment program appears to have been hobbled for the better part of a year, its technical resources drained and its human resources cast into disarray. The “software” in question was a computer worm called Stuxnet, which is already being viewed as the greatest triumph in the short history of cyberwarfare.

Stuxnet first surfaced on June 17 of this year when a digital security company in Minsk, VirusBlokAda, discovered it on a computer belonging to one of its Iranian clients. It quickly became clear that Stuxnet was not an ordinary piece of malware.

Stuxnet is not a virus, but a worm. Viruses piggyback on programs already resident in a computer. Worms are programs in their own right, which hide within a computer and stealthily propagate themselves onto other machines. After nearly a month of study, cybersecurity engineers determined that Stuxnet was designed to tamper with industrial systems built by the German firm Siemens by overriding their supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) protocols. Which is to say that, unlike most malware, which exists to manipulate merely virtual operations, Stuxnet would have real-world consequences: It wanted to commandeer the workings of a large, industrial facility, like a power plant, or a dam, or a factory. Exactly what kind of facility was still a mystery. (more…)

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STUXNET WORM STILL AFFECTING IRANIAN NUCLEAR SITES

Friday, December 10th, 2010

Stuxnet Worm Still Out of Control at Iran’s Nuclear Sites, Experts Say

By Ed Barnes

Published December 09, 2010  | FoxNews.com

Aug 21: The first fuel is loaded into the reactor building at the Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran.

Iran International Photo Agency, via AFP

Aug 21: The first fuel is loaded into the reactor building at the Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran.

EXCLUSIVE: Iran’s nuclear program is still in chaos despite its leaders’ adamant claim that they have contained the computer worm that attacked their facilities, cybersecurity experts in the United States and Europe say.

The American and European experts say their security websites, which deal with the computer worm known as Stuxnet, continue to be swamped with traffic from Tehran and other places in the Islamic Republic, an indication that the worm continues to infect the computers at Iran’s two nuclear sites.

The Stuxnet worm, named after initials found in its code, is the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever created. Examination of the worm shows it was a cybermissile designed to penetrate advanced security systems. It was equipped with a warhead that targeted and took over the controls of the centrifuge systems at Iran’s uranium processing center in Natanz, and it had a second warhead that targeted the massive turbine at the nuclear reactor in Bashehr.

Stuxnet was designed to take over the control systems and evade detection, and it apparently was very successful. Last week President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after months of denials, admitted that the worm had penetrated Iran’s nuclear sites, but he said it was detected and controlled.

The second part of that claim, experts say, doesn’t ring true. (more…)

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HOW TO FIGHT AND WIN THE CYBERWAR

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010
  • The Wall Street Journal
    • DECEMBER 6, 2010

    We should think of cyberattacks as guided missiles and respond similarly—intercept them and retaliate.

    EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE:  Not many people realize that all of our nation’s air, land and sea forces rely on network technologies that are vulnerable to cyberweapons, including logistics, command and control, fleet positioning and targeting. If they are compromised or obliterated, the U.S. military would be incapable of operating

    Several years ago, during the presidency of George W. Bush, many banks and Wall Street firms were knocked offline. The financial industry, which had long been considered to have the best safeguards against cyberinfections in the private sector, discovered its computers had been penetrated by a worm, so-called because a virus grown on one computer can worm its way to millions of others. Mr. Bush asked then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to examine what it would take to protect our critical infrastructures. The upshot was that steps were taken to strengthen the security of the military networks, but little else was done. (more…)

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    BEWARE THE 21ST CENTURY SUPERWEAPONS

    Monday, November 8th, 2010

    WASHINGTON TIMES

    Stopping the Next Stuxnet


    by Austin Bay
    October 20, 2010Can a worm bust a hydroelectric dam, on command?

    The cyber-warrior scenario goes something like this: If the worm is a computer worm (or other digital malware) infecting a dam’s computer system, it might be possible to use the malicious code to take control of the supervisory operating system. The attacker then orders the computer to open the dam’s gates and thus create a destructive flood inundating cities downstream. The computer worm would breach the dam with deniable finesse, rather than the concrete and traceable mess left by a high explosive bomb or a nuclear weapon.

    Enter the Stuxnet computer virus, first detected this past summer. If Stuxnet is not “weaponized malware” designed to strike a specific target and achieve specific military results, it is certainly an improved cyber-attack tool and a step closer to the dam-busting malware scenario.

    Computer experts understand and respect its threat. StrategyPage.com, on Oct. 3, described Stuxnet as “the first piece of malware to damage the computer systems which control industrial plants,” and its emergence should serve as “a wake-up call to the world.” StrategyPage compared Stuxnet’s strategic military implications to the introduction of intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 1950s — weapons that could strike global targets. (more…)

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    STUXNET, THE COMPUTER WORM

    Monday, November 1st, 2010

    Computer worm creates an

    opening for copycats

    By Shaun Waterman The Washington Times

    Sunday, October 10, 2010

    Mugshot**FILE** In this photo from Nov. 30, 2009, released by the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency, the reactor building of Iran’s Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant is seen just outside the port city of Bushehr, 750 miles south of the capital Tehran, Iran. (Associated Press)

    Stuxnet, the sophisticated computer worm that attacked industrial control systems over the summer, is a “wake-up call” about the vulnerability of factories and power plants to hackers and other cybersaboteurs, according to security specialists.

    Although Stuxnet itself is carefully targeted, probably at just one facility where the attackers have inside knowledge, the worm has served as a “proof of concept” for spies and criminals all over the world, and there’s growing concern that U.S. power stations or chemical plants might be targets of less-discriminate copycat attacks.

    “The big fear is that Stuxnet provided a road map for malicious actors who can copycat it to launch similar attacks against other industrial control systems” in the United States, one cybersecurity consultant for the utility industry told The Washington Times. (more…)

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    CYBER WARFARE

    Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
    The New Yorker

    Annals of National Security

    The Online Threat

    Should we be worried about a cyber war?

    by Seymour M. Hersh November 1, 2010

    Some experts say that the real danger lies in confusing cyber espionage with cyber war.

    Some experts say that the real danger lies in confusing cyber espionage with cyber war.

    On April 1, 2001, an American EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane on an eavesdropping mission collided with a Chinese interceptor jet over the South China Sea, triggering the first international crisis of George W. Bush’s Administration. The Chinese jet crashed, and its pilot was killed, but the pilot of the American aircraft, Navy Lieutenant Shane Osborn, managed to make an emergency landing at a Chinese F-8 fighter base on Hainan Island, fifteen miles from the mainland. Osborn later published a memoir, in which he described the “incessant jackhammer vibration” as the plane fell eight thousand feet in thirty seconds, before he regained control.

    The plane carried twenty-four officers and enlisted men and women attached to the Naval Security Group Command, a field component of the National Security Agency. They were repatriated after eleven days; the plane stayed behind. The Pentagon told the press that the crew had followed its protocol, which called for the use of a fire axe, and even hot coffee, to disable the plane’s equipment and software. These included an operating system created and controlled by the N.S.A., and the drivers needed to monitor encrypted Chinese radar, voice, and electronic communications. It was more than two years before the Navy acknowledged that things had not gone so well. “Compromise by the People’s Republic of China of undestroyed classified material . . . is highly probable and cannot be ruled out,” a Navy report issued in September, 2003, said. (more…)

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    IRAN’S NUCLEAR PLANTS INFECTED BY STUXNET, A COMPUTER WORM

    Sunday, October 3rd, 2010

    THE WEEKLY STANDARD

    How Stuxnet is Scaring the Tech World Half

    to Death

    BY Jonathan V. Last

    September 30, 2010 2:30 PM

    The computer worm Stuxnet broke out of the tech underworld and into the mass media this week. It’s an amazing story: Stuxnet has infected roughly 45,000 computers. Sixty percent of these machines happen to be in Iran. Which is odd. What is odder still is that Stuxnet is designed specifically to attack a computer system using software from Siemens which controls industrial facilities such as factories, oil refineries, and oh, by the way, nuclear power plants. As you might imagine, Stuxnet raises big, interesting geo-strategic questions. Did a state design it as an attack on the Iranian nuclear program? Was it a private group of vigilantes? Some combination of the two? Or something else altogether? (more…)

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    “STUXNET” WORM ATTACK

    Friday, October 1st, 2010

    September 25th, 2010 3:34 pm

    Cyber War on Iran: the Siemens

    Connection

    While the boors and bores of the mainstream media continue to focus on the “crucial matters” of our time such as Stephen Colbert’s tedious appearance before Congress and whether a Delaware senatorial candidate spent two days as a witch in high school,  news of real importance is breaking all around us.
    I am not just referring to the cataclysmic testimony by Chris Coates  in front of the Civil Rights Commission on Friday, but to a yet bigger story with a potentially huge implications for geo-politics — the recent (and possibly ongoing) cyber attack on Iranian computers that may have temporarily crippled the nuclear capability (and who knows what else) of the totalitarian Islamic state.
    Yesterday, I wrote some preliminary words about this highly sophisticated attack by the so-called “Stuxnet” worm; today we learn the startling news the Iranians themselves have admitted that something serious has happened. Such admissions are certainly not common from the secretive state. From Asia Bizz:

    The Iranian Ministry has stated that some 30000 industrial computers have been infected by Stuxnet. One of the main operations done by Stuxnet is that it extracts vital information from these systems and then sends it somewhere abroad. Iran has termed this virus as a spy virus, as it is deploying vital data to other countries. On the other hand it is said, a similar attack has been reported from Iran’s latest nuclear power plant facility, but these reports have not yet been confirmed. (more…)

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