A US/Israeli cyber attack on Iran's nuclear program?
Interesting NYT article claiming that the Stuxnet worm was aimed specifically at Iranian centrifuges...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/wo...ewanted=1&_r=1
Quote:
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.
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."
Our concern with such attacks has typically been that they would be used against the US: like other swords, this one apparently has two edges.
Stuxnet: targeting Iran's nuclear programme
An IISS Strategic Comment, which provides a good IMHO overview, starts:
Quote:
..it is essentially a delaying tactic and has not dimmed the country’s resolve to develop nuclear capabilities..
and ends with:
Quote:
Cyber sabotage is likely only to buy time for the international community to devise alternative policy responses to Iran’s nuclear programme. In the meantime, sanctions and negotiations are likely to remain their priority.
Link:http://www.iiss.org/publications/str...ear-programme/
Hackers release Stuxnet's decompiled code online
http://www.rockto.com/launcher/33781...ed-code-online
Quote:
The Anonymous group released the Stuxnet code on 13 February, after finding it in a database of e-mails it stole from HBGary. “First public Stuxnet decompile is to be found here,” one representative of the group wrote over Twitter.
Stuxnet: Cyberwar Revolution in Military Affairs
Stuxnet: Cyberwar Revolution in Military Affairs
Entry Excerpt:
Stuxnet: Cyberwar Revolution in Military Affairs
by Paulo Shakarian
Download The Full Article: Stuxnet: Cyberwar Revolution in Military Affairs
On June 17th, 2010, security researchers at a small Belarusian firm known as VirusBlockAda identified malicious software (malware) that infected USB memory sticks. In the months that followed, there was a flurry of activity in the computer security community – revealing that this discovery identified only one component of a new computer worm known as Stuxnet. This software was designed to specifically target industrial equipment. Once it was revealed that the majority of infections were discovered in Iran, along with an unexplained decommissioning of centrifuges at the Iranian fuel enrichment plant (FEP) at Natanz, many in the media speculated that the ultimate goal of Stuxnet was to target Iranian nuclear facilities. In November of 2010, some of these suspicions were validated when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad publically acknowledged that a computer worm created problems for a “limited number of our [nuclear] centrifuges.” Reputable experts in the computer security community have already labeled Stuxnet as “unprecedented,” an “evolutionary leap,” and “the type of threat we hope to never see again."
In this paper, I argue that this malicious software represents a revolution in military affairs (RMA) in the virtual realm – that is Stuxnet fundamentally changes the nature of cyber warfare. There are four reasons to this claim: (1) Stuxnet represents the first case in which industrial equipment was targeted with a cyber-weapon, (2) there is evidence that the worm was successful in its targeting of such equipment, (3) it represents a significant advance in the development of malicious software, and (4) Stuxnet has shown that several common assumptions about cyber-security are not always valid. In this paper I examine these four points as well as explore the future implications of the Stuxnet RMA.
Download The Full Article: Stuxnet: Cyberwar Revolution in Military Affairs
Paulo Shakarian is a Captain in the U.S. Army and a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the University of Maryland (College Park) and will soon take up a position teaching computer science at the U.S. Military Academy. He holds a BS from the U.S. Military Academy and an MS from the University of Maryland (College Park), both in computer science.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Military Academy, United States Cyber Command, the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the United States Government.
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