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Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

Posted by Soulskill on from the cyber-bombshell dept.

diewlasing sends this excerpt from the NY Times: "From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America's first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program. Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran's Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet."

13 of 415 comments (clear)

  1. Uhm, so we're at war now with Iran? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So I guess this means we're officially at war with Iran since it was declared that acts of cyberterrorism would be considered acts of war, right?

    1. Re:Uhm, so we're at war now with Iran? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Also note that said reporter is trying to sell a new book.

      Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, by David E. Sanger. Hardcover on Sale: June 05, 2012.

    2. Re:Uhm, so we're at war now with Iran? by denobug · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Oh, by the way. Would someone please explain it to me why we Americans can have nuclear power and nuclear weapons but other countries can't?

      Try this analogy: I have a gun on my hand, not pointing at you. You went around looking for a gun while screaming and whining that I have a gun and I am about to shoot you, so you must have a gun, and point your shiny new toy at me. I don't think 1) that makes me feel secure, simply because I inevitably has a gun first, and 2) people around you feels very sane for you to have a gun, because you are yelling and screaming that you want to hurt me.

      that's sums up why american doesn't want someone else to have nuclear weapons. The less nations has it the less likely we are towards planetary destruction.

    3. Re:Uhm, so we're at war now with Iran? by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Chicago politics are really corrupt, do you realize that? It's not just mayor Daley, whose son was later mayor as well. There's a lot of corruption going on in Illinois, the majority of their recent governors are in jail. Obama learned politics as a political organizer, and later as a senator. He chose advisers from there. Why would he NOT learn the political tricks of the area?

      Not everyone in Dallas is a jackass, but they are more likely to favor secession, for example. Not every politician in Chicago is corrupt, but they are more likely to be. (Although some might say 'corrupt politician' is a tautology).

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    4. Re:Uhm, so we're at war now with Iran? by SomePgmr · · Score: 5, Interesting

      As someone that's lived in the area his whole life, we all know, and sadly accept, that our politicians are degenerate criminals. The political history of the city and state are an ongoing joke for a reason... we've earned it. I couldn't even guess how many are currently in prison or have done time.

      Also, when you say Mayor Daley, most of us think of the more recent Richard M. Daley, who is very much alive and avoided prison (though many of his people didn't).

      You can start here and just keep reading down, though there are fun bits before it too...
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_M._Daley#Daley_orders_demolition_of_Meigs_Field

  2. a Democratic administration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    has more leaks than a colander...

    and one thing i've never understood: if i were the commander-in-chief and had proof positive that Iran was killing our soldiers with bombs, i'd let loose on a few select targets in Iran - but i guess we haven't had a President with an cojones in a while, have we?

  3. Ask yourself "In whose interest is this story?" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A story like this doesn't just magically happen. It's not wikileaked. So why would someone want this story in the public? Could it be so that tension between the USA and Iran ratchets up? Because that could induce a whole lot more spending on the military. And all those people who aren't going to be making buckets of money from Iraq and Afghanistan will either need to adjust their standard of living downwards, or find new sources of income. Getting military with China is a bad idea, North Korea is too close to China - look what happened last time - it's the only reason there is a North Korea. Nope: better to pick on a country more isolated.

  4. Where are all the naysayers by crazyjj · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When Stuxnet came out, every time someone posted that it was likely the creation of Israel and/or the U.S., they were greeted by a surprising number of deniers who were trying to claim it was Russia or Saudi Arabia, or maybe that Iran *themselves* created it, etc. Of course, this was insane. But there seem to be a LOT of people out there who have their head buried in the sand when it comes to U.S./Israeli intelligence activities in Iran. I bet even now if I were to say that Mossad had assassinated all those Iranian nuclear scientists, there would be several idiots who would jump up and claim it was someone else, or that Iran had just staged the assassinations.

    --
    What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
    1. Re:Where are all the naysayers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      a) just because someone is only interested in posting pro-Israel content doesn't mean they are on the payroll.
      b) also, it doesn't mean they aren't

      My blog started getting a lot of non-browser hits about 4 yrs ago - some were "abusive" to my bandwidth, so I looked up where they were from - besides Baidu (who does not honor robots.txt), there were lots and lots of "brand awareness" crawlers and oddly named crawlers from cities in Maryland and Northern Virginia. I decided to block them at the firewall, completely. Baidu was blocked in the reverse proxy, since they had entirely too many subnets and were over 50% of my total traffic, but only sent 1 or 2 redirects a month. At the time, Google was 5% of the traffic but 98% of the redirects for anyone interested. Those stats have changed a little, I'm seeing more bing redirect, but still almost nothing compared to google.

      Those crawlers from the DC area were interested in political content, not my complaints about Canonical, Microsoft, Oracle or Redhat. They didn't seem to care at all about virtualization, which is the primary reason for my little blog with 85% of the content.

      I believe in the US Constitution and most amendments, though I would add more protections for privacy from our and other governments across the board.

      Meddling in other countries without either their people or government asking is bad, provided they don't intend to harm others outside their borders. I must just be naive about the ways that governments interact with each other.

  5. I am ashamed to be an american by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_ajax

    Every single thing that we complain about Iran being is our fucking fault and now we blatantly continue with our evil foreign policy.

    Every single thing that I was told this country stood for is a lie.

    1. Re:I am ashamed to be an american by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It is a great wiki article, thanks for the refresher ;-)

      Half way down is an interesting quote that brings this back to the original topic:

      "The action was publicized within Iran by the CIA and in the United States by The New York Times.

  6. Re:Why This Misconception of Obama? by Nidi62 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    He became the first president to authorize the assassination of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and played an operational role in Al Qaeda, and was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen. .

    Now, I am admittedly not an Obama fan, never have been. But I have a hard time calling the al-Awlaki incident an assassination. The man declared war on the US and was leadership in an organization actively targeting and fighting the US. Now, to make a comparison, back during World War II Germany tried to get a lot of Germans living abroad to come back to Germany. Some of these were people living and born in the United States, and some of them joined the German military. You cannot call it an assassination if they were killed fighting the US. To me what happened with al-Awlaki is no different. This is among one of the few things he's done that I can support and get behind.

    --
    The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
  7. Your loaded word by Quila · · Score: 1, Interesting

    when the executive branch orders drone assassinations abroad

    They are not assassinations. As you note, this is a war. Killing enemies during a war, by whatever means, is not an assassination. We targeted Yamamoto during WWII, shot down his plane. Assassination? No, not called that.

    Don't these people realize the real damage caused by drones strikes?

    Yes, we're taking out a lot of their guys. If this pisses off their supporters, or if they're fond of using human shields, then too bad. Shooting down Yamamoto really pissed off the Japanese too.