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Was Russia Behind Stuxnet?
An anonymous reader writes "Despite the U.S. and Israel being widely assumed to be responsible for Stuxnet, Russia is the more likely culprit, says U.S. Air Force cyber analyst. The nuclear gangsterism of the past 20 years gives it plenty of motive. Quoting: 'So what better way to maintain Russian interests, and innocence, than to plant a worm with digital U.S.-Israeli fingerprints? After all, Russian scientists and engineers are familiar with the cascading centrifuges whose numbers and configuration – and Siemen’s SCADA PLC controller schematics – they have full access to by virtue of designing the plants. ... the observers of the virus could alert the Iranians before full nuclear catastrophe struck. The Belarusian computer security experts who 'discovered' the code seemingly played that role well. They didn't seem too preoccupied with reverse engineering the malicious code to see what it was designed to do.'"
Well, the centrifuge itself doesnt. But if it somehow infects a critical PLC, like say the one that controls reactor rods, or ventilation, or whatever.
Point being, something other than centrifuges could get infected, and that something could be bad.
It is. For a start, the centrifuges aren't full of uranium. They are full of uranium hexafluoride, a gas. No possibility of it going critical. The worst case scenario would be that containment is ruptured and the gas escapes - it's nasty stuff, about a ten on the flesh-melt-o-meter, and will quite happily burn though walls and boil the skin off of anyone who gets in it's way. If that happens it'll kill a few workers and completly destroy the centrifuge, but that's all. No boom.
Having said that a lot of people think Iran wont nuke Israel because that'd kill arabs too
Iran couldn't care less about what happens to the Arabs. Iranians are different ethnically, culturally and religiously (Shia vs Sunni), and there's no love lost between the two. Indeed, it is debatable whether Israel is really Iran's enemy #1 (other than in propaganda), or whether their neighboring Sunni majority countries are that.
Sorry if I am wrong here, but are you not just producing wild theories here? Surely you don't know what Stuxnet intended to do, so how could you rule that it could not have caused a nuclear catastrophe?
There was an analysis by German researchers that he bases his information on.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/all/1
http://www.ted.com/talks/ralph_langner_cracking_stuxnet_a_21st_century_cyberweapon.html
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.