On the Cyber Warfront

The New York Times quoted intelligence and military experts to say that U.S. and Israeli intelligence services collaborated to develop a destructive computer worm to sabotage Iran's efforts to make a nuclear bomb; the Stuxnet computer worm shut down a fifth of Iran's nuclear centrifuges in November and helped delay its ability to make its first nuclear weapons; before using Stuxnet to attack Iran's nuclear program, Israel has tested the effectiveness of the malware at the heavily guarded Dimona complex in the Negev desert which houses Israel's undeclared -- and the Middle East's sole -- nuclear weapons program.

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Experts and officials told the Times the effort to create Stuxnet was a U.S.-Israeli project with the help, knowingly or not, of Britain and Germany.

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There has been widespread speculation Israel was behind the Stuxnet worm that has attacked computers in Iran, and Tehran has blamed the Jewish state and the United States for the killing of two nuclear scientists in November and January.

Homeland Security Newswire

The U.S. has spent years warning that cyber warfare is the New Terrorism of the 21st Century; former DNI Michael McConnell even demanded in The Washington Post that the Internet be re-engineered to vest government and the private sector much greater surveillance controls to combat it (without disclosing the huge profits his Booz Allen clients stand to gain from such measures). All the while, the U.S. was collaborating with the Israelis to engineer the most sophisticated and destructive cyber warfare weapon the world has ever known, one it secretly unleashed last year (and that's to say nothing of the assassination of Iranian scientists which this weekend's New York Times article obliquely mentions without expressing any interest in knowing who the culprits are).

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[T] he real agents of harnessing Interent and media technologies to promote freedom and human rights in Tunisia (and elsewhere) are either currently imprisoned by the U.S. (Manning), being harassed and on the verge of being prosecuted (WikiLeaks), or constantly demonized in the American media (Al Jazeera). And that's all being done by the same government that stands behind these repressive regimes and punishes those who seek to expose them -- all while lecturing the world about the evils of those who seek to stifle transparency and freedom.

Glenn Greenwald

The project’s political origins can be found in the last months of the Bush administration. In January 2009, The New York Times reported that Mr. Bush authorized a covert program to undermine the electrical and computer systems around Natanz, Iran’s major enrichment center. President Obama, first briefed on the program even before taking office, sped it up, according to officials familiar with the administration’s Iran strategy.

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The worm itself now appears to have included two major components. One was designed to send Iran’s nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly out of control. Another seems right out of the movies: The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.

The attacks were not fully successful: Some parts of Iran’s operations ground to a halt, while others survived, according to the reports of international nuclear inspectors. Nor is it clear the attacks are over: Some experts who have examined the code believe it contains the seeds for yet more versions and assaults.

“It’s like a playbook,” said Ralph Langner, an independent computer security expert in Hamburg, Germany, who was among the first to decode Stuxnet. “Anyone who looks at it carefully can build something like it.” Mr. Langner is among the experts who expressed fear that the attack had legitimized a new form of industrial warfare, one to which the United States is also highly vulnerable.

Israel Matzav

Like everything in warfare…when you introduce it, it can be used against you.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.