Slashdot Mirror
Iran Claims New Cyber Attack On Its Nuclear Plants, Blames US and Allies
judgecorp writes "Iran has reported that its nuclear facilities are under a sustained cyber attack which it blames on the U.S., UK and Israel. America and Israel created Stuxnet, and have been accused of starting the Flame worm." And once a country admits that it's created such software, publicly deflecting such blame gets a lot harder.
I'm pretty sure you've figured out by now that the U.S. and Israel are trying to sabotage your nuclear program. If the numerous targeted computer viruses didn't clue you in, you must have at least noticed the dead bodies of your nuclear scientists starting to pile up.
Don't you know there's a war on, son?
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
No one "officially" has admitted to Flames, Stuxnet, or otherwise. It's always some anonymous source, or former (apparently the current ones are too busy to give interviews) official.
Your nuclear weapons program for enriching uranium was fucked up because of a computer virus.
You know what DOESN'T need highly enriched uranium? CANDU and Throrium reactors. Gee, I wonder why Iran isn't interested in those, the only difference is that they can't be used to make nuclear weapons...
Where has once have the government admit they created it? Both links are just basically from David Sanger and his book where the first link is an article by him and the 2nd link an adaptation of the story-line from his book (which they state at the very bottom of the article).
I'd hardly call that the government admitting it when it's more like an accusation from someone with possible inside sources. Nowhere in any of these articles has there even been a comment made by the US government. If you are gonna report on something, at least put the correct viewpoint on it. All these "confirmation" articles are just articles respinning the story made by Sanger.
As for it's validity, could be true, could be false. But i definitely don't like the way it's being told. It's more akin to being told a fantasy novel then an actual news report. They don't even have quotes from their sources stated specifically. The entire story is told in a mix of imagination and (possible) facts which aren't clear.
Iran is such a great country, I love how they act like my country is still important.
Of course, the easiest way to disrupt our network communications is still a well placed physical disruption.
It's called a Slashdotting. Pioneered it, back in the day.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
"Your computer could be at risk from infidels! Click here for Jihad!"
Gets em every time.
How does one "meltdown" a centrifuge?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Isn't kind of a bad idea to deliberately mess up controlling computers in a nuclear plant?
The only thing deliberately messed up were the speed controllers on the centrifuges which were enriching Uranium, and the 'messed up' meant that the speed would very subtly oscillate in speed to mess up the enrichment process.
There is no part of that which could cause a meltdown.
1) You are the dumbest person alive.
2) No it doesn't.
3) That doesn't matter at all.
Here is how it works, try to pay attention. A device called a PLC is connected to a device called a drive via copper wires. The drive is connected to a motor, which is connected to a gearbox, which spins the centrifuge. The drive varies the frequency of the electricity going to the motor and thereby varies the speed at which the motor turns (and thus the centrifuge). The PLC contains ladder logic which governs the speed reference it sends to the drive. So, the PLC controls the speed at which the centrifuge turns.
As it comes out of the box, the PLC contains no ladder logic at all. In order to control anything, one must load ladder logic into it. Now, here is where your stupidity prevents you from being qualified to jabber on about this: you can't load ladder logic into the PLC using QNX. You can''t develop the ladders on QNX. QNX cannot communicate with the PLC in any way at all except to read and write to its data tables using interfaces defined by the PLC vendor. In Stuxnet's case that was Siemens.
The payload of Stuxnet was delivered during the above ladder logic development phase. They'd have sent a destructive speed reference to the centrifuge drives whether then supervisory software was QNX, or Wonderware on Windows, or Citect, or whatever else.