New York Times Reports US and Israel Behind Stuxnet

Oxford_Comma_Lover writes "Confirming heavy speculation in the Slashdot community, the New York Times reports that joint US-Israeli efforts were almost certainly behind the recent Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear program." The article stops just short of saying in so many words that Israeli is the doer, but leaves little doubt of its conclusion.

Comments

When this happens to the US or its allies

[countertrolling]

It will considered an act of war resulting in the real thing, of course.

Re:When this happens to the US or its allies

[guyminuslife]

They don't have nukes. But lets say, for argument's sake, that they develop them.

First of all, any nuclear weapons that Iran develops are likely to be much smaller-scale than the weapons that have been rusting away in the US stockpiles since the 1950s. Fat Man and Little Boy were big bombs, but they aren't even close to the scale of the arms developed during the Cold War.

Second, a nuclear Iran does not mean the difference between zero nuclear weapons and the stockpile that, say, Russia/Britain/India has. There's a recurring cost and a recurring development time.

Third, and probably most importantly, Iran doesn't have the capacity to send long-range missiles. (This is also the case with North Korea.) They could nuke Israel, but not much further than that. The United States would not see any damage due to conventional deployment; the only way that Iran would be able to attack would be to supply terrorist groups.

But then their country's ash. I don't have particularly high esteem for the Iranian leadership, but they're not stupid, they're not suicidal, and they understand MAD. So it's a moot point. The rationale for wanting nukes is pretty obvious: Iran is in a position where two of its neighbors got invaded in the past 10 years by the Americans, who they don't stand a chance against in a conventional war, and who have been rattling their sabers since 1979. I don't think Iran particularly cares about starting a war, the nuclear program is more of a deterrent against turning into Iraq or Afghanistan.

Re:From the No-**** Department...

[jmauro]

There was some decent evidence that it was actually a Chinese-Finnish operation

My guess is when it's all declassified in 100 years or so we'll find out it was actually created out of different virus cross breeding and the Internet has been alive this entire time. Yea, I'll be shocked too.

Re:Color me impressed

[drolli]

Or you have to have spys in the Companies providing the parts. Siemens does not have a strong culture of being paranoid, especially not against western/pro-western secret services, with which they probably collaborate anyway when it comes to identifying industrial espionage from other services. I am pretty sure that the BND (German secret service) can ask them for plans and details quite openly (i guess you don't produce parts relevant for nuclear technology or military infrastructure without having liaison officer assigned to you), and probably also for the source code of the embedded SPS modules. For sure the same holds true for the manufacturer of the turbines. Since the Western secret services collaborate on an less prominent, informal level (see e.g. the BND agents in Baghdad during the war which reported back to the NATO headquarters, where obviously - no records exist - they helped clearing military targets in Iraq, despite Germany no being officially involved in the war).

I would guess that actually several secret services collaborated in this, but the "Cui Bono?" points to Israel.

OpenBSD IPsec

[Mysteray]

Jason Wright, the OpenBSD developer funded by NETSEC to work on IPsec (and allegedly put in backdoors for the FBI) went to work at the DHS cyber security lab that the NYT is saying helped do Stuxnet http://nyti.ms/grd51X http://bit.ly/feB9ZV

SecTor 2008 gives his speaker bio http://www.sector.ca/speakers2008.htm

Jason Wright is a cyber security researcher at the Idaho National Laboratory working with SCADA and Process Control system vendors to secure critical infrastructure assets. He is also a semi-retired OpenBSD developer (also known as a "slacker") responsible for many device drivers and layer 2 pieces of kernel code.

I am not making this up.

I'll have to put it in a blog post this evening. See homepage link.

Re:Still Speculative.

[epine]

The haven't confirmed anything.

I think your typing speed and your reading speed are linked together.

The article does a great job of laying out means and motive and avenues of military conspiracy, and furthermore, documents that the means are exceptionally esoteric and that the motives precisely align with recent policy statements on the parts of the alleged conspirators, who I might add have a brazen rap sheet, but who now seem to increasingly fear "three strikes and you're a lout".

Where the article fails hopelessly is explaining what a three year delay actually buys us. What's the leverage point? Is this just a bunch of politicians playing "not on my watch" or will the Risk board change in some interesting way over the short hiatus?

Will the Ahmadinejad faction wane as a result? Will it cause the Iranians a crisis of confidence in foreign technology procurement? This bit the Russians hard after the Siberian pipeline thing. Will the Americans sew things up in Iraq over that time period to enable them to better address the Iran situation when the pot finally boils?

These are the real questions the article fails to address.

Concerning the slow news day knee jerk, I don't understand why the jury convicted Hans Reiser. It was nothing but informed conjecture about an arrogant prick until he cracked post sentencing.

Re:Insertion

[plover]

Ummm... no. Flaws in Siemens' software (including exploiting default passwords in their package, and great difficulty in changing the passwords once deployed) were an important component in the worm's ability to insert the actual command codes into the industrial control systems. And if you'd have read TFA, you'd have seen that in 2008 Siemens met with Department of Homeland Security officials to go over the security of the SIEMATIC PCS 7 industrial control systems. The DHS had the most intimate knowledge of the weakness of Siemens' systems possible, having been asked to evaluate them for security flaws!

Given the sophistication of the worm, and the determination of the attackers, it's quite likely that it would have been written to infiltrate whatever systems they were running. Windows XP just happened to be very easy to target. But had it been a UNIX or Mac system, they would probably have found a way to get their malware installed anyway.

Re:Still Speculative.

[h4rm0ny]

Three years is a long time for an unpopular government run by radicals, thieves, and thugs.

True, but I'm less optimistic than you about the American people overthrowing their government in that time scale.