Stuxnet Computer Virus, Obama To Take Credit

[American_Jihad]

Israeli Mossad Agents: We Developed Stuxnet Computer Virus, Obama Trying To Take Credit For It To Bolster Election Chances…

I can’t imagine the Mossad is all that surprised a shameless hack like Obama is trying to take credit for their work by leaking bogus details to the NY Times that make him look tough on Iran as he tries to win reelection.
WZ

Israeli Spies Want Credit for Stuxnet

John Hudson Jun 8, 2012

Israel's officials have a message for anyone praising the CIA for its sophisticated cyber attack on Iran: It was our baby. The Stuxnet computer worm, described by David Sanger in The New York Times last week as an invention by the Bush administration, was actually developed by Mossad, according to Israeli officials speaking with Haaretz journalist Yossi Melman on condition of anonymity:
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Israeli Spies Want Credit for Stuxnet - Global - The Atlantic Wire

 

[Polk]

It was joint operation. Operation Olympic Games. Started during the Bush admin.

 

[waltky]

Stuxnet neutralized...

Stuxnet thwarted by control code update
24 July 2012 - Iran's nuclear enrichment efforts have been targeted by sophisticated cyber attacks

German engineering giant Siemens has issued a fix for the software loopholes used by the notorious Stuxnet worm. Stuxnet was discovered in 2010 after investigations into malfunctions at many industrial plants and factories. Iran's nuclear enrichment efforts were hit hard by Stuxnet which targeted the devices that control delicate industrial processes. The fix comes as reports circulate of a fresh cyber attack on Iranian nuclear enrichment project.

Burn out

Stuxnet exploited loopholes in the software Siemens wrote to oversee the running of its programmable logic controllers - devices used in many industrial facilities to automate a production process. When a controller was infected with Stuxnet it made the motors it was typically connected to run out of control and burn out. This is believed to have been behind Iran's need to replace many of the centrifuges it was using in its Natanz uranium enrichment plant. Siemens has issued advisories saying it has updated the Simatic code in the controllers to remove the loopholes. It is not yet clear who created Stuxnet, but security researchers say it is so complex and tightly targeted that only a nation would be able to marshal the resources to put it together.

Stuxnet is just one of several similar malicious programs created to attack industrial control systems. Experts speculate that many were made to slow down and disrupt Iran's nuclear production processes. Iran has regularly denied that the viruses have hit its nuclear programme. The Siemens update comes as security firm F-Secure received an email believed to have been sent by a scientist working at Iran's Atomic Energy Organization. In the message, the scientist said its plants at Natanz and Qom have been hit again by a worm.

Top F Secure security researcher Mikko Hypponen said it had not been able to confirm any of the details in the message. However, digital detective work did reveal that the message had come from within the Atomic Energy agency. On 23 July, Iran issued a statement saying it had successfully "confronted" sophisticated malware and thwarted all the cyber attacks against the nation's infrastructure. Reza Taqipur, Iran's minister of communication and information technology, said it was sometimes hit by as many as two million cyber attacks a day, but its ability to deal with them was growing daily.

BBC News - Stuxnet thwarted by control code update

 

[waltky]

Granny says, "Dat's right - Obama puttin' a worm up Ahmajabberjob's butt...

Mystery Worm Scrambles Iranian Databases
26 Nov.`12 - On Monday, an Iranian company named “TarrahSystem” put out an alert about “W32.Narilam” targeting some of their software, according to Kaspersky.

A new worm that appears to be targeted at Iran seeks to sabotage corporate databases by searching for specific phrases and values and replacing them with random ones. This latest bug, dubbed the "Narilam" worm, goes after Microsoft SQL databases, according to Symantec, which first uncovered the malicious code. Despite its ability to destroy databases, it may be cold comfort to its victims to know that Narilam does not steal data. "The malware does not have the functionality to steal information from the infected system," Shuinchi Imano, a Symantec security researcher, said. "[It] appears to be programmed specifically to damage the data within the targeted database."

Imano went on to say that the "vast majority" of affected Symantec customers were corporate users and not individual consumers. The worm searches for words related to financial accounts in English and Persian. Hackers, some of them state-sponsored, have targeted corporate and government servers in Iran in the past. The infamous Stuxnet worm, a collaboration between the United States and Israel, temporarily crippled Iran's nuclear development program in 2010. Earlier this year, the extremely sophisticated Flame spyware was found infecting computers in Iran's oil ministry.

Narilam is unusual because of its ability to write updates to a SQL database, Imano said, and businesses without backups will have great difficulty recovering from the attack. "The affected organization will likely suffer significant disruption and even financial loss while restoring the database," he added. "Those affected by this threat will have a long road to recovery ahead of them." However, it's not clear whether Narilam is playing in the same league as the state-sponsored bugs. Kaspersky Lab, which has found several likely cyberweapons in the past couple of years, doesn't think this one qualifies. "Narilam is a rather old threat that was probably deployed during late 2009 and mid-2010," read a blog posting on Kaspersky's SecureList blog. "Unlike Duqu or Flame, there is no apparent cyberespionage function. ... There are very few reports of this malware at the moment, which means it's probably almost extinct."

Source

See also:

AP Exclusive: Graph suggests Iran working on bomb
Nov 27,`12 -- Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, according to a diagram obtained by The Associated Press.

The diagram was leaked by officials from a country critical of Iran's atomic program to bolster their arguments that Iran's nuclear program must be halted before it produces a weapon. The officials provided the diagram only on condition that they and their country not be named. The International Atomic Energy Agency - the Vienna-based U.N. nuclear watchdog - reported last year that it had obtained diagrams indicating that Iran was calculating the "nuclear explosive yield" of potential weapons. A senior diplomat who is considered neutral on the issue confirmed that the graph obtained by the AP was indeed one of those cited by the IAEA in that report. He spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue.

The IAEA report mentioning the diagrams last year did not give details of what they showed. But the diagram seen by the AP shows a bell curve - with variables of time in micro-seconds, and power and energy both in kilotons - the traditional measurement of the energy output, and hence the destructive power of nuclear weapons. The curve peaks at just above 50 kilotons at around 2 microseconds, reflecting the full force of the weapon being modeled. The bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima in Japan during World War II, in comparison, had a force of about 15 kilotons. Modern nuclear weapons have yields hundreds of times higher than that. The diagram has a caption in Farsi: "Changes in output and in energy released as a function of time through power pulse." The number "5" is part of the title, suggesting it is part of a series.

David Albright, whose Institute for Science and International Security is used by the U.S. government as a go-to source on Iran's nuclear program, said the diagram looks genuine but seems to be designed more "to understand the process" than as part of a blueprint for an actual weapon in the making. "The yield is too big," Albright said, noting that North Korea's first tests of a nuclear weapon were only a few kilotons. Because the graph appears to be only one in a series, others might show lower yields, closer to what a test explosion might produce, he said.

MORE

 

[waltky]

Stuxnet goes back further than first thought...

Report: Stuxnet cyberweapon older than believed
Feb 27,`13 -- The sophisticated cyberweapon which targeted an Iranian nuclear plant is older than previously believed, an anti-virus company said Tuesday, peeling back another layer of mystery on a series of attacks attributed by many to U.S. and Israeli intelligence.

The Stuxnet worm, aimed at the centrifuges in Iran's Natanz plant, transformed the cybersecurity field because it was the first known computer attack specifically designed to cause physical damage. The precise origins of the worm remain unclear, but until now the earliest samples of Stuxnet had been dated to 2009, and The New York Times - in the fullest account of the attack published so far - traced the origins of the top-secret program back to 2006. In a new report issued late Tuesday, Symantec Corp. pushed that timeline further back, saying it had found a primitive version of Stuxnet circulating online in 2007 and that elements of the program had been in place as far back as 2005.

Independent security experts who examined the report said it showed that the worm's creators were well ahead of their time. "To me, it's amazing," said Mikko Hypponen, whose Finland-based F-Secure has studied Stuxnet. "We had no idea the U.S.-Israel cyberoperations were so advanced already almost a decade ago." Hypponen is one of a host of experts who've concluded that Stuxnet was an attempt to sabotage the uranium enrichment centrifuges at Iran's Natanz nuclear plant, a key element in the Islamic republic's disputed atomic energy program. Because the United States and Israel are two of Iran's biggest foes, the shadow of suspicion immediately settled on their tech-savvy intelligence services.

That theory got a boost when the Times reported that President George W. Bush had ordered the deployment of Stuxnet against Iran, laying out in unprecedented detail how the worm had been crafted so as to surreptitiously send Natanz's centrifuge machines spinning out of control. U.S. and Israeli officials have long declined to comment publicly on Stuxnet or their alleged involvement in creating and deploying the computer worm. Symantec's report suggests that an intermediate version of the worm - Stuxnet 0.5 - was completed in November 2007. That worm lacked some of the sophistication of its descendant, Symantec said, and was designed to interfere with the centrifuges by opening and closing the valves which control the flow of uranium gas, causing a potentially damaging buildup in pressure. That approach was dropped in later improved versions of the Stuxnet code.

Symantec said the servers used to control the primitive worm were set up in November 2005, suggesting that Stuxnet's trailblazing authors were plotting their attack at a time when many parts of the Internet now taken for granted were not yet in place. Twitter did not exist, Facebook was still largely limited to U.S. college campuses, and YouTube was in its infancy. Alan Woodward, a professor of computer science at the University of Surrey, said that had troubling implications. "Clearly these were very forward-thinking, clever people that were doing this," he said. "There's no reason to think that they're less forward-thinking now. What are they up to?"

Source

 

[waltky]

Iran's chief hacker gets wasted...

Iranian cyber warfare commander shot dead in suspected assassination
2 Oct 2013 ~ The head of Iran’s cyber warfare programme has been shot dead, triggering further accusations that outside powers are carrying out targeted assassinations of key figures in the country’s security apparatus.

Mojtaba Ahmadi, who served as commander of the Cyber War Headquarters, was found dead in a wooded area near the town of Karaj, north-west of the capital, Tehran. Five Iranian nuclear scientists and the head of the country’s ballistic missile programme have been killed since 2007. The regime has accused Israel’s external intelligence agency, the Mossad, of carrying out these assassinations. Ahmadi was last seen leaving his home for work on Saturday. He was later found with two bullets in the heart, according to Alborz, a website linked to the Revolutionary Guard Corps. “I could see two bullet wounds on his body and the extent of his injuries indicated that he had been assassinated from a close range with a pistol,” an eyewitness told the website.

The commander of the local police said that two people on a motorbike had been involved in the assassination. The Facebook page of the officers of the Cyber War Headquarters confirmed that Ahmadi had been one of their commander and posted messages of condolence. But Alborz users warned that the openly accessible book of condolence could harm Iran’s national security. “Stop giving more information about him. The counter-revolutionaries will take advantage of his murder,” said one post. “It sounds like a hit job for a security officer of this importance”.

Subsequently, a statement from the Imam Hassan Mojtaba division of the Revolutionary Guard Corps said that Ahmadi’s death was being investigated. It warned against speculating “prematurely about the identity of those responsible for the killing”. Western officials said the information was still being assessed, but previous deaths have been serious blows to Iran’s security forces. Tighter security measures around leading commanders and nuclear scientists have instilled a culture of fear in some of the most sensitive parts of the security establishment. The last victim of a known assassination was Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a chemist who worked in the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, who died when an explosive device blew up on his car in January last year.

The death of Ahmadi, a leading specialist in cyber defences, could be an extension of this campaign of subterfuge. Iran has been accused of carrying out a number of cyber attacks detected in the West. Shashank Joshi, an expert at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), said this was seen as a lesser threat than the nuclear programme. “Iran’s cyber attacks on Israel and elsewhere in the region are a rising threat and a growing threat, but it hasn’t yet been seen as a major and sustained onslaught, so it would be pretty novel and significant to take this step in the field of cyber-warfare at this time,” he said.

The Revolutionary Guard has also been accused of lending its expertise to Syria’s regime, helping it to hack Western targets through a body known as the Syrian Electronic Army. The killing of Ahmadi coincides with a new diplomatic effort by President Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s newly elected leader. He has voiced the hope that Iran’s confrontation with America and the leading Western powers over its nuclear ambitions can be settled within months.

Source

 

[waltky]

Granny says, "Dat's right - dey done let Pandora outta her box...

Internet experts: ‘Widespread harm’ likely from cyber attack in next decade
October 29, 2014 — Be afraid of potentially devastating cyber attacks, and be better prepared to guard against them. But also be wary of the risks — especially to privacy — that accompany a growing focus on cyber security that may exaggerate some threats.

Those are among the major themes and dissents that emerge from a report Wednesday by the Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center. Its authors surveyed more than 1,600 computer and Internet experts on the future of cyber attacks, and found that most said there was good reason to worry about what previous attacks portend. More than 60 percent answered “yes” to the question: “By 2025, will a major cyber attack have caused widespread harm to a nation’s security and capacity to defend itself and its people?” “The majority opinion here is that these attacks will increase and that lots of institutions, including major government institutions, will be at risk,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Internet Project and coauthor of the report.

Rainie said many experts pointed to the Stuxnet worm as an example of the devastation that a cyber attack could wreak on essential systems such as power grids, air-traffic controls, or financial institutions. Stuxnet, widely believed created by either U.S. or Israeli intelligence to undermine Iran’s nuclear program, infected the software of at least 14 industrial sites in Iran, Pew said. Pew said Stuxnet helped destroy as many as a fifth of the centrifuges Iran was using to enrich radioactive fuel that could be made into weapons. Unlike computer viruses, which a user must unwittingly install, worms can spread on their own through a computer network once they are introduced.

Many study participants called Stuxnet a harbinger of future cyber attacks. Jason Pontin, editor and publisher of MIT Technology Review, told Pew that “there has already been a ‘Pearl Harbor’ event: the Stuxnet computer worm that was used to attack Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Do we really believe that the infrastructure of a major industrial power will not be so attacked in the next twelve years? The Internet is an insecure network; all industrialized nations depend on it. They’re wide open.” Some said a Cold War-like dynamic — particularly the threat of “mutually assured destruction” — should inhibit international cyber warfare. One predicted “many, many small and medium-size cyber attacks between now and 2025, but nothing on a major scale.”

Others saw more danger to financial systems than to other kinds of infrastructure, which states or terrorists could more easily target with conventional weapons. “Right now cyber attacks are too costly,” one unnamed respondent said. “The bigger risk will be when cyber crooks drain Wall Street of all its cash.” And some warned that the threats themselves “are being exaggerated by people who might profit most from creating an atmosphere of fear,” said coauthor Janna Anderson, of Elon University. Some also warned that privacy would continue to suffer from an overreaction to security threats. “Perhaps I am optimistic, but this concern seems exaggerated by the political and commercial interests that benefit from us directing massive resources to those who offer themselves as our protectors,” wrote Jonathan Grudin, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, who said media reports overstate the threats.

Recalling President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the influence of a “military-industrial complex,” Grudin said leaders seem “powerless to rein in the military-industrial-intelligence complex, whose interests are served by having us fearful of cyber attacks.” Many of the skeptics also voiced hope that the biggest threats were containable. “While in principle all systems are crackable, it is also possible to embed security far more deeply in the Future Internet than it is in the present Internet environment,” said Lee McKnight, a professor at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies. McKnight said that while it was easy to see today’s multimillion-dollar online financial frauds foreshadowing even larger attacks on property or life, “the white hat good guys will not stop either.” Both the worriers and the skeptics agree on one point: Today’s expensive cyber arms race has only just begun.

Internet experts Widespread harm likely from cyber attack in next decade - U.S. - Stripes