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How Investigators Deciphered Stuxnet
suraj.sun tips a story at Wired that takes an in-depth look into how security researchers tracked down and worked to understand the infamous Stuxnet worm. The article begins:
"It was January 2010, and investigators with the International Atomic Energy Agency had just completed an inspection at the uranium enrichment plant outside Natanz in central Iran, when they realized that something was off within the cascade rooms where thousands of centrifuges were enriching uranium. But when the IAEA later reviewed footage from surveillance cameras installed outside the cascade rooms to monitor Iran's enrichment program, they were stunned as they counted the numbers. The workers had been replacing the units at an incredible rate — later estimates would indicate between 1,000 and 2,000 centrifuges were swapped out over a few months. The question was, why?"
The part about the differences in loyalties of the Symantec researchers was telling, though.
"We don't care if this harms something important our country is doing to stop madmen from getting the Fist of God. We have customers to do business with!"
...expanding enrichment production because of the influx of tubes was a direct result of this damage...?
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There was another good article in Vanity Fair
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
I like it; it's pretty damn readable.
Yes. Those poor, poor theocrats.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
> In this case, if you read the article - it's fascinating (highly recommend!) - whether there were any 'wrongful acts' would seem to
>depend solely on perspective, and receiving a fair trail in Iran is somewhat of an oxymoron.
Right well... thats the point now isn't it.
> So the real question here is, is delaying Iran from making nuclear weapons (which they'd most use for mass murder) by a method
> that caused no loss of life itself (unlike a bombing), an act of evil? I guess that depends which side you're rooting for.
Well, only if you assume that the major purpose of this venture is a weapons program. The stated purposes are peaceful and lawful. It is also entirely likely that, even if a weapons program were hidden in the works, that the major effect will be peaceful power as, nobody has used a nuke in war in over 60 years, and I don't see that trend changing, whether they get them or not.
Honestly, I agree most with the assessments that say that the best way to deal with Iran is to give them the recognition that they want...and stop pulling stupid chest pumping adversarial tactics, and sabotaging what could be progress towards normalization of relations and, eventually their own reform. However, pulling this sort of shit plays right into the strong hand of those in Iran who would want weapons programs and oppose reform, and rebuilding trust with the rest of the world.
Its hard to argue with "they are out to get us, and see us as the enemy" when.... well... their shit gets sabotaged and we just grin and laugh at them. If this happened to the UK we would be doing everything we could to help catch any Americans involved.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
In 1993, I was working one Saturday at Pacific Data Images in Sunnyvale. (who later went on to make such classics as "Shrek", but that's another story.) At the time we were one of the leading CG advertising companies in the world.
Anyway, I wandered into the front lobby, and there was a guy there, the husband of the receptionist, that had this very long roll of paper, maybe 20 feet, with a undulating line drawn along it it. He was searching up and down along the line, for quite some time....well, I couldn't help but ask what it was.
He said that it was the fourier transform of the power line going into a plant. He and his company were examining the spectrum to see if they could deduce what was going on inside the plant -- if the machines inside the plant would leak substantial information back onto the power line. Anybody with any electrical engineering experience would know that of course this would be true. I said, OK, that's interesting. What do you see in this spectrum?
And he pointed to a little sinc() shaped (kind of sombrero shaped) area at a particular frequency. And then showed the aliases of that at higher frequencies. He said that these were clearly signatures of many six-pole electrical motors running all at almost exactly the same speed. I looked inquistitive, and he said, "you know, like if you had a bunch of uranium gas centrifuges running." I thought about this for a few minutes....and said, "uhm, OK, but we don't use centrifuges to separate uranium", and he said "no, we don't" and left it at that.
Soon, he was back to Iraq, using a ground-penetrating radar he developed to look for buried weapons. I never saw him again.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
No one declares anti-semitism, but anti-zionism.
Zionism is the political movement to re-establish the Jewish State, contradicting the scriptures about staying away... (Why keep Sabbath then?).
In any case, the Zionists waged war and won the land by force, then proceed to get rid of locals, who naturally resisted the invasion in any way they could. Lots of slaughtering and struggle in the process; oh yes, the Zionists did started with terrorism when the land was controlled by the UK... Were you not told about King David Hotel bombing?
The methods the Israeli forces use are simply mass murdering people trapped and sieged in ghettos. Sounds familiar doesn't it? Yes, ethnic cleansing it is; and all sorts of air bombardment and land and even sea warfare against civilians, mostly armed with just rocks and pitiful glorified firecrackers. No NATO bombing, or no fly zones there... Thousands of innocent people die in Gaza, the UN doesn't care, even after Israel destroys UN facilities there.
Say what you like about Iran, they haven't dropped white phosphor cluster bombs against civilians, Israel has; everyone watched "Cast Lead". Israel once bombed a Nuclear power plant in Irak, but nothing of the sort has occurred to Israel from Irak. And before there were incidents like the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, guess who was involved? The current Prime Minister... Reality surpasses intentions.
Things like executions occur when you let religious extremists in power. It would be the same if you followed your traditions to the letter. Do not forget both religions have the same root, and Christianity as well. And all of them have committed atrocities in the past, and in that very same patch of land even.
The Islam scripture actually treat Jews (and Christians) with respect, and before the Zionists invaded, local Jews and Christians did live there just like they live in other countries.
You say Israel is "surrounded", No s*** Sherlock, Zionists invaded the land and waged war against all its neighbors (defeating them). Thats when a violent future for Israel was sealed; and you have fanatics killing their own leaders, when daring to reach peace after decades of bloodshed.
Zionists don't care about anything and anyone, they want their conquered land clean of Palestinians and anti-zionists and they don't care about the UN or even if the whole world declared war against them, they have the nukes ready should they ever lose.
"Anti-semitism" is Zionist propaganda against anyone who dares think different.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
This article was a great read, it reminded me of my own first-hand experience with a time bomb planted in PLC code.
The company I was working for at the time manufactured hydraulic presses, the newest one installed at a long time customer included a touch screen control system running WinCE that was front-ending a PLC to control the machine. We had contracted out the development work on the control system and the owner of the company ended up in a billing dispute with the contractor just as the machine was being brought online. In the days before the dispute came to a head, the contractor had been on-site at the customer "making minor improvements to the interface based on customer feedback".
One day the customer calls and says: "Our brand new hydraulic press has stopped working and the control system guy says he can't fix it until you pay him." After the owner of the company was done swearing at the contractor on the phone and literally kicking a hole in his office door, he calls me in and tells me he needs me to go over to the customer and "undo whatever that a**hole did".
I had a basic understanding of PLC programming and access to a prior version of the touch screen interface and PLC code. It took a few hours of scanning both sets of code by hand on-site at the customer, but I located the very basic checks for system date in the touch screen interface code which would set a value that the PLC would read and trigger a safety interlock which effectively disabled the machine's function. This was easily remedied once discovered.
It was a slightly stressful experience for me as I had no input on this control system until the day it was disabled and I was on the spot to fix it. Once it was resolved, I was quite happy.
I'm pretty sure the billing dispute ended up going to the lawyers.