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A Finnish-Chinese Connection For Stuxnet?
Lingenfelter writes "I recently wrote a white paper entitled 'Dragons, Tigers, Pearls, and Yellowcake' in which I proposed four alternative scenarios for the Stuxnet worm other than the commonly held assumption that it was Israel or the US targeting Iran's Bushehr or Natanz facilities."
Since everyone else is taking credit, I might as well...
In which, i will blame stuxnet worm on late Marilyn Monroe.
Read radical news here
Israel is (by far) the most nervous about Iran's nuclear program, and already had one pre-emptive attack on a nuclear plant under it's belt that (in their worldview) was a resounding success and is a point of national pride.
So one of the drives targeted by stuxnet is manufactured in China...I hate to state the obvious, but what isn't?
On the presumption that this is some electronic device with a user-modifiable firmware (how else would the worm be able to modify it?) - what would stop Iran from taking an unaffected piece, dumping the firmware, and re-uploading it?
Do a clean reinstall of Windows, and you're set to go.
Is there something I am missing?
China is actually worrying about Irans nuclear ambitions but for different reasons than most of the west is. They arent worried too much about Iran attacking any of its interest but dont want to see US influence continue to grow in the region
Its already well established(and the leaked cables support this) that many of the other countries in the area are quite wary of Iran and its ambitions, and a nuclear armed Iran would give the US and these countries a rationale for increasing US presence and influence in the region. China does not see this as being beneficial in the long run as it sees the US as its biggest, and really only, potential rival. Therefore they are against a nuclear armed Iran but on the other hand Iran is one of Chinas biggest oil suppliers and it really does not want to piss them off. So Chinas position is to try to prevent Iran from getting nukes while at the same time looking like the `good guy`. They often times abstain when it comes time to vote on Iranian sanctions in the security counsel. This essentially gives them an out, they can continue to see sanctions and pressure put on the Iranian nuke program without looking like a bad guy to Iran. They can always tell the Iranians that they were worried about vague and unspecified reprecussions if asked why they didnt vote no.
Monstar L
Because they have visited, and some have stayed on, as well. They are amongst us now. Aliens. Believe it !! Or not. I won't tell. They'll lock me up and throw away the key this time !!
Iran not only gets money but also Chinese coal in exchange for their crude oil that they sell to China. Now when Iran finishes their reactors, Iran needs less coal for making electric energy. But China will still need the oil. Thus they have to pay more for the oil. Even worse, the less coal Iran needs the less dependent they become on China, so they are more likely to sell thei oil to other countries.
Sabotaging the nuclear plants of Iran is a cheap way to sustain the co-dependancy between Iran and China.
This will go against the entire business mantra, but if he is right the West really needs to pull back manufacturing of electronic devices and make more serious efforts to combat Chinese electronic warfare, because in this case they were either incompetent or simply didn't give a shit about collateral damage. Either option is exceedingly worrying,
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Interesting article, which (indirectly) raises an even more interesting question:
If China was behind the StuxNet worm, why would they risk undoing all of their careful origin-obfuscation work by subsequently carrying out two high-risk meat-space operations against high-level Iranian engineers?
One possibility is that they simply didn't . Once the worm came to light, some other intelligence agency with a more direct way of handling things may have decided to seize the opportunity to increase the worm's lifespan by eliminating the people most likely to stop it.
If two different parties were behind the worm and the assassinations, TFA's China theory might indeed be plausible.
A conspiracy theory, particularly one which is as convoluted and as baseless as this is, does not gain any magic credibility if the loony that devised it happens to write it down in a document which then proceeds to refer to it as a "white paper". I understand his desperate need to sell his little pet conspiracy theory on the authoritativeness of the "white paper" label alone but that doesn't make it any more true.
One of the world's most prolific spammers has hid out in Finland from time to time. While his hiding out there does not make an argument for Finland supporting his actions, it does suggest that it may be a place where computer criminals can hide out fairly effectively. Being as he was controlling a botnet from there to pump spam, it would not be hard to envision him using the same botnet to attack someone he views as an enemy - regardless of whether or not they have any negative affiliations with anything he does directly.
Of course if it really is Kuvayev - who makes most of his money selling counterfeit prescription drugs - he may actually be acting very short-sighted here. He may be concerned that radiation accident victims wouldn't want to buy his counterfeit viagra, while really he should be thinking of all the other drugs he could sell those people...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Iran needs nuclear weapons to be sure US and Israel wont invade. Those two knows that the minute Iran has nuclear weapons as a deterrent, they cant invade. This is an endless loop where Usrael says invasion is the only solution because Iran is trying to get nuclears to deter an invasion.
The only really path to getting Iran off the path to nuclears are that the US and Israel promises to not invade Iran. Since thats their goal they wont.
One can hope China will step in and assure the freedom of Iran from US/Israeli aggression and thus disarm the situation. Thus far China have taken a very laid back aproach to the rest of the world and tried to not interfere with other countries policies. Maybe the time has come to rethink that.
HTTP/1.1 400
Its already well established(and the leaked cables support this) that many of the other countries in the area are quite wary of Iran and its ambitions, and a nuclear armed Iran would give the US and these countries a rationale for increasing US presence and influence in the region. China does not see this as being beneficial in the long run as it sees the US as its biggest, and really only, potential rival.
A rival that is not only it's biggest market, who if it went bankrupt would render all the debt China purchased worthless.
Besides the attack has probably been devised using an operating system originating from Finland!
China is an intriguing idea as the source for the malware.. if you think about it, China's interests are in no way served by the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea. Western military action against either could be disastrous for the status quo that China depends on, but equally they might not want to side with the west. So quietly sabotaging the nuclear programmes of either or both might be an example of Realpolitik - that is, practical politics that achieves useful results rather than grand gestures.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
A spectacularly worthless summary.
And even in TFA you have to click through three different links just to download the white paper.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
China would be far more likely to imbed this in the motherboard or nic than to rely on USB as a delivery vehicle.
I think you need to include the
Stuxnet Israel Wikileaks connection that was anounced in the last couple of days
Yeah because a hardcore Jewish extremist would use the Christian calendar with the American date format to celebrate their martyr.....
Monstar L
That is actually more of a Chinese date format which is the format frankly that makes the most sense (at least for sorting). American's use MM-DD-YYYY as the standard though there is some use of DD-MM-YYYY and YYYY-MM-DD depending on the field.
I don't see the Chinese ticking off a major oil supplier. China has nothing to win and much to lose in doing so. Stux (sounds like Tux) looks to me like the work of Nixie! Nixiepixel. Mother of All Evil.
You leave a dog alone with a steak. When you later come back, the steak is eaten.
Who ate the steak? It could of course be anyone or anything. It could even be the FSM.
In all recent stuxnet-stories I've read on slashdot I've found a lot of comments (modded +5) beginning like this:
I don't know why everyone is so quick to assume it's {USA,Israel} behind this. It could be {Random country, the Yeti}...
Which is of course true. If you don't know who did it, you don't know who did it. BUT! That doesn't mean every possibility has the same probability.
Did you get the tungsten-carbide coated tinfoil idea from me?
Either way, how about going into business together?
There's money to be made from paranoid people..
Glenn Beck and talk radio do the prep work for us and we do Cha-ching!
Stuxnet has been found throughout the world, you make it sound like they only found it in one facility.
That the date of death (19790509 or 9th of May 1979) for a jewish martyr, lynched during the iranian islamic revolution is hardcoded in a registry key used by Stuxnet. QED
Ok, I'm convinced: it wasn't the Israelis.
Two things convince me of that: the unbelievably lame little astro-turf campaign going on here with AC's all repeating "I'm gonna go with the OBVIOUS on this one" without one shred of actual evidence to back it up; and this particular claim that a group as canny as the Israelis would effectively sign the worm with a value that points back to them.
The astro-turfer's efforts are simply racist, no different from the police looking for a convenient person of the correct racial orgin to pin a crime on. You don't need to have any evidence, just a general knowledge that your favourite ethic group are likely to be criminals, so if a crime was committed it's OBVIOUS that one of them must have done it, right?
But this "signature" is proof of non-Israeli origin, as it requires an incredibly subtle and clever attack on Iran's nuclear program to also include an apparently clear indication of who did it.
In my experience with the Israelis, they aren't shy about taking credit. Nor are they shy about bombing Iranian nuclear facilities.
So sticking them with Stuxnet requires that Israel for some reason decide to take an indirect, deniable, clandestine approach, AND AT THE SAME TIME hardcode a clear pointer to Israeli origin in the code.
For anyone who finds anything "obvious" about that, I recommend a visit to Dr. Ockham.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
That is actually more of a Chinese date format which is the format frankly that makes the most sense
It is the ISO date format: YYYY-MM-DD. It is the only acceptable standard date format for most uses.
People ignorant of modern standards, or incapble of adapting to changing times, still use some weird and archaic date formats, gifting us with ambiguous nonsense like 10/6/8.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I have never understood why the US use MM-DD-YYYY...gosh darn it is retarded and backwards and arbitrary.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
I'm sure I could concoct any number of scenarios if I really wanted to. But Israel is far-and-away the obvious suspect--with the obvious motive, means, and opportunity. Of course, they could have been framed--but then so could have O.J. and pretty much every guy on death row. It all comes down to whether you want to accept the simplest and most obvious solution, or construct a big conspiracy theory because you're such an Israel fan that you just WILL NOT accept that they might have done something like this.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
They knew about the design of the facility, but if I read the Symantec decoding of this they did it in a very generic way based on a specific configuration which is quite likely to repeat in all similar centrifuge sites. That would target both Iran and North Korea and even potentially Pakistan I guess. But it also means that it targets any facilities with a similar configuration. It would be very very very interesting to know if their targetting would cause a nuclear leak. If it did, would that be detectable from the outside. If so, did they then identify the location of other secret plants?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
what is worse is that we also use DD-MM-YYYY at the same time, so two identical looking dates may have a different value, so you always have to know what the format is to correctly interpret a little less than half our dates.
Hand in your nerd card now. That is the date format. The ISO date format. The only one which alphanumerically sorts in proper order. The one which has no hundred year problem. The one which is easily upgradable to a 10kyear date format without changing ordering. They would use that because it is right. These are people who can make an virus attack on the other side of the world with precision and surprise. They will get the date format right.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Regardless of who actually did the deed, chances are a lot of folks where involved by knowing what was happening and deciding not to say anything to the Iranians about it. Sometimes the most effective spying is when you known, but say nothing.
There are a lot of parties that stand to lose from a nuclear Iran.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
The sabotaged facilities were for mainting nuclear power, not for producing bombs. There's yet to survive any the evidince that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.
But China never cared about the US-imposed trade embargoes. They won't certainly start to care in the future. The leverage of the US is simply too weak on them, to force them to stop trading Oil with Iran, for example.
Less dependent on China's coal, is enough for Iran to buy less of China's coal, which is bad for China.
The reason China may export coal to Iran is not because they need to make money selling coal, but because they have to sell it to Iran in order to get the Iranian oil.