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Trojan Horse Caused A Siberian Explosion
An anonymous reader writes "William Safire of the nytimes [nytimes.com] has an interesting column this week describing how the Soviets purchased bogus computer chips from the West in the 1970's. These chips caused what "was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space." Fascinating story."
I rememeber that Russia once developed a base-3 computer called ``Trinity''. I cant find a link on it, but I know that it worked. I cannot imagine how logical operations would work on sutch a thing though.
My father was one of developers of top secret soviet chips in 1970's. Many of them were clones of western devices. We had lots of chips, transistors, Fortran listings and special books at home. Most of them were lost because we moved four times in last 24 years.
As far as we (me and my dad) know no chips or computers were purchased from "the West" before 1980's. We developed and manufactured clones of 360, PDP, VAX and others instead. They were software-compatible with Western ones but contained only Soviet (and other Eastern Europe) components.
Later we got VAXen (I remember two of them), Macs (no personal experience) and IBM PC.
wish to develop their own indigenous computer technologies industries instead of simply buying it from us and possibly subjecting themselves to this sort of intergovernmental terrorism? Had this explosion taken place in a populated area the blood would be on our hands.
It goes way beyond issues of economic competition. It's a question of independence, control and security.
Rather like your use of Open Source software.
KFG
Basically, the Soviets got suckered because they outsourced the software and chips to US firms.
Doesn't anybody see the similarity between what companies are doing now (with outsourcing) and the Soviet Union did 20 years ago?
And in case you're wondering, this is why Congress is afraid of cyber-terrorism - we literally used computers to kill people in Siberia in the 80's. Perhaps they are scared that the same thing could happen here?
I realize the fears of cyber-terrorism are overblown, but it is a real threat. The threat isn't from outside hackers, but rather, from insiders who plant trojan software programs and sabotage hardware. What would happen if a nuclear power plant computer was programmed to silently vent small quatities of nuclear waste over a period of months or years? By the time it would be noticed, it would be too late to avert disaster.
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This is actually similar to the kind of tricks that Israeli intelligence would play on Palestinian militants. The militants would buy their weaponry from Israeli gangsters, who most likely would have stolen it from the IDF. So, pretty soon Mossad was posing as criminals and selling booby-trapped bullets to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The bullets would explode violently when fired, destroying the gun and possibly injuring its owner. It took a while for the guerillas to figure out how to check the bullets to make sure they are real, working ammo.
Also, Mossad would occasionally find ways to sell cell phones to their enemies- except the phones would be packed with explosive, so all you had to do was call the phone and start a conversation to make sure the person who you are after is the one holding the phone, then press a special combination of keys- and BOOOM.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
Indeed the funniest thing to me is that Clancy except for a few years of ROTC never served in the military at all. (I believe he was an insurance salesman but I could eb wrong about that detail)
You are correct sir. I was a Midshipman at the US Naval Academy when "The Hunt for Red October" was published. He couldn't get a mainstream publisher, but the Naval Institute Press (which prints mostly textbooks used at USNA) picked it up.
While I don't recall any attempt at subjecting Clancy to a court-martial (remember, the Navy's pet publisher printed this book), I once read a Navy report discussing the accuracy of Clancy's depiction of the US Submarine (the USS Dallas, I recall). It was amazingly accurate, but the report concluded Clancy obtained his information from unclassified sources such as Janes Fighting Ships, etc.
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Did you RTFA?
Straight from the article:
The catch: computer chips would be designed to pass Soviet quality tests and then to fail in operation.
While the main anecdote of the article is about bogus software, computer chips are mentioned.
Just take a look at key military technology in the '60s and '70s:
First men in space: Russia (implies better ICBMs)
First operational jetfighter with thrust-vectoring (MIG): Russia
First working long-term space stations: Russia (also used for spying)
First undedectable stealth fighter dedected and shot down by: Russian technology in Yugoslavia (nice done, guys!)
World's most powerfull rocket: Russia (Energija), implies that they could launch a BIG amount of plutonium for a BIG shot.
Most reliable rocket technology: Russia
First figher plane with look-and-lock systems (you look at your enemy and the rockets automatically lock onto that target): Russia (IMHO the MIG25)
Well, sure, USA has a great deal of hightech gadgets lying around, but the Soviets are the guys that actually made them working.
There was also a big fuss about that the USSR stole the space shuttle technology for their Buran shuttle. Actually, the Buran uses a more modern design, has a much higher capacity, better aerodynamics and even can fly completly on automatic (whereas the US shuttle must be landed per joystick).
Sure, the USSR stole *some* technology, but the US wasn't any better. Didn't they steal MIG's whenever they saw a chance, just to try out how to beat them in air combat and integrate russian thruster-design into US fighters?
Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev
The story is total crap.
I served in Strat. Int. and I can say with total confidence that -if- such a thing happened heads in the community would roll.
In a time of all out war, yes it would be ok.
But the Cold War was not all out war and such a thing would have been an act of war, and not worth the risk.
The Nixon and Reagan administrations would have been stupid enough to risk GTNW for a feather like that, but nobody else until GB2.
The pipeline was not a proper target for such an action.
Yeah, except verifiable sources. Note this was in the opinion section of the Times. I haven't been able to find a shred about this event anywhere. (Though I'm still looking.)
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Here's some info about the fall which killed Gus Weiss:
washinton post article and Nashville Tenessean obit
Notice that Audrey Wolf, mentioned in the latter obit, is Joseph Wilson's literary agent.
Not that that should mean anything...
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
Don't you think any halfway-decent conspiracy could plant a few of these things out in the desert somewhere?
Overall an OK hypothesis, but I think it falls down on this one point.
It was very easy for the government to lie about WMD. Say, the Intelligence Services have someone who says his brother knows a man who thinks overheard someone talking about Saddam's biological weapsons. The Intelligence Services dismiss it as poor evidence, but the government are so desparate to find anything that will support their desire to go to war that they choose to accept it. So in accepting a peice of dubious evidence, and then passing it onto the public, they have effectively lied. I don't find it too difficult to imagine this kind of "conspiracy" has taken place.
What you're talking about is in a whole different league. For the Brits or Americans to deliberately take biological or nuclear weapons into Iraq, hide them, and then pretend to "find" them - the risks of doing that, and the chances of getting found out, are so high that it's something I don't think they would never try.
I think they probably thought "we think they might have WMD, but we haven't got much good evidence. Let's tell the public we do have good evidence so they object less when we invade, then we're sure to find something once we're there and the public will be satisfied." Only they didn't.
The Soviets were not stealing to simply copy blind, they were stealing to learn the technology. The US had to expect that every line of code they gave would be reverse engineered and disassembled.
There's no code, they would have to examine every single transistor -OR- they perform testing to ensure the chip produced the correct output for a given input. We had to hope they missed the exception condition, which they apparently did.
I don't care what the alleged technology is, there was no technology available at the time that was complex enough to hide a trojan in and expect it not to be found.
I'm sorry, but this simply isn't correct. You're making this MUCH more complicated than it was, it wasn't as complex as "trojan horses" we see today. But it was a "trojan" in that it appeared to have one function when there was a hidden, malicious sub-function being hidden.
It would be a pretty easy matter to hide a trojan in Windows NT or Linux today.
Agreed, AND we could have had MUCH better control over the results. BTW, I'm NOT trying to be combative (as in typical /. style, which I fall victim to myself sometimes), I merely want to point out what was described very definately could have been (and seemingly was) done given the tech available. It's much more "basic" than they author describes, but roughly accurate...
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy