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Iran Arrests Alleged Spies Over Stuxnet Worm
kaptink writes "Reports surfacing from Iran claim 'nuclear spies' have been arrested over the infection at the Busheher nuclear station, which opened in August. According to Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi, because Stuxnet is so sophisticated, cost so much to write and uses two stolen security certificates, he believes only a national intelligence agency or a huge private company could have devised it, calling them 'enemies' spy services."
They may be right this time, but who will believe them? For those living under a rock, I'm referring to the 3 American hikers who allegedly strayed over the border from Kurdish Iraq, two of which are still being held as spies.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If it were targeted at Iran's nuclear sites by a hostile foreign government, they'd have been a lot more stealthy about it and waited until the thing was in operation to trigger a catastrophic melt-down. I'm sure that the reason it's most prevalent in Iran is due to lax security practices and not some conspiracy against them.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
So called security experts - most of them in fact peddlers of software who depend on the fear of malware for their incomes - are not unbiased commentators. Remember how USL claimed that Unix was too complicated for Berkeley grad students to have replicated without copying their proprietary code? And SCO claimed that Linux couldn't possibly be that good without belonging to them? In fact, there's no software "so sophisticated" that it can't be produced by a bunch of sufficiently dedicated geeks.
It's an argument particularly appealing to conspiracy theorists - look at how the authors of "The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail" insisted that no-one would expend the effort to forge the documents they relied on, even after the hoax was admitted. You just can't judge this kind of thing on that basis.
Rest assured, you'll never catch those in charge. I doubt there are names on it. Maybe an agency, but they aren't going to be dumb enough to step into Iran. Iran is simply using these arrests as as political tool to further their own goals.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
See the thing is Iran is so efficient on on catching crooks (whether they are actually guilty of the crime the are charged with or not) while the rest of the world seems to lag way behind.
Why?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Iran is a ratified signatory to the Nuclear Non-Profileration Treaty, so: they certainly don't have the right to develop nuclear weapons or even nuclear facilities except with IAEA oversight. Iran's nuclear activity is pretty clearly in contravention of this (they built a nuclear facility in secret near Qom, for example), and there are now several UN sanctions in force against Iran because of this.
Is it 'Western hubris' to demand that a country abide by treaties it ratified? Especially a treaty on a matter as important as nuclear armament...
The reason the West is so hostile to the possibility of a nuclear Iran is that the only peaceful doctrine nuclear weapons allow, MAD, assumes rational actors on all sides. In Iran that rationality might well be subservient to theology.
Admittedly I didn't know much about Stuxnet until after reading more about it and it seems to me just yet another windows virus that hasn't until now been discovered and mistakenly spread via contractors laptops. . . .
Seems to me that this worm wasn't designed for a specific target and is like any other virus..
From what I've read, it was specifically written to infect Siemens controllers, root them so it could change the control algorithms while displaying the proper algorithms when polled. The controllers are located at each piece of equipment, typically running independently, each with a minimal OS, if any. They are connected in a local network to allow communication and central monitoring and adjustment.. Stuxnet only used Windows vulnerabilities as a vector to get onto the front-end workstations in order to load into the controllers through the local network.
Israel is noticeably, quite literally, greener than its neighbours.
That's why they deserve that land, they take better care of it.
Bullshit. Israel is destroying it - this "making the desert bloom" crap is destroying the water aquifers there which is one of reasons Israel is pulling so many provocative actions with Lebanon, they want an opportunity to seize access to the Litani river.
The Palestinians have literally spent centuries developing olive grove orchards which are very sustainable in desert climes. Then "settlers" bulldoze them down and plant Orange groves and other such water intensive plants such as Celery, exhausting the local aquifers, leaving just a fraction of water they've pissed in for the Palestinians.
What was started by people who just wanted their constitution back, of course has drawn attempts from all over to co-opt it in some way. Duh....don't you know how things work?
Even on NPR...they had an "interview" with a Texas woman who was a real tea party organizer, and cut in with some dude who was one of those religious wing nuts (only a member of the tea party, so he said) who basically, right there on the air threatened that if the tea party didn't go his way (org of family something or other) they'd pull out. She said, fine -- you are welcome here, it's a big tent, but nope, we're not going to push your particular cause for you, why not go try and convince the NRA to push laws against abortion -- you're in the wrong place.
Though NPR is showing signs of seeing blood in the water and not as much a cheerleader of the current majority in government as before, this was their big attempt to discredit the tea party, and it failed pretty badly I think.
When something like that comes from nowhere and threatens the incumbency machine that is the rebuplocrats -- sure, there's going to be a s**t storm of attempts to discredit it, again, doh.
If either the dems or the repubs were "for the people" would there be the mickey mouse copyright law? Would pot still be illegal? Wouldn't someone at least have gone to jail over the economic issues? I'm too lazy to type the other five hundred examples, do some homework.
You might not like the tea party, and for sure it has collected some whack jobs -- big tents do that.
Wouldn't a bunch of crazy incompetents do a better job than the current batch of well connected thieves?
I rest my case.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!