Posted on 09/25/2010 9:11:15 AM PDT by Pride_of_the_Bluegrass
SAN FRANCISCO: Computer security experts are studying a scary new cyber weapon: a software smart bomb that may have been crafted to find and sabotage a nuclear facility in Iran.
Malicious software, or malware, dubbed "Stuxnet" is able to recognise a specific facility's control network and then destroy it, according to German computer security researcher Ralph Langner.
"Welcome to cyber war," Langner said in a post at his website. "This is sabotage."
Langner has been analyzing Stuxnet since it was discovered in June and said the code had a technology fingerprint of the control system it was seeking and would go into action automatically when it found its target.
"It's pretty amazing," James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said on Thursday. "It looks like more than simple cyber espionage."
(Excerpt) Read more at economictimes.indiatimes.com ...
This guy must be a friend of Julian whats his name.
Microsoft Windows has been doing this for years, LOL.
yeah, I think it was called “Vista”
o lol it only took four posts.
Why are control systems for critical systems on public networks? How did idiots get in charge?
Idiots aren’t in charge when critical systems for enemy powers get on public networks.
Let’s tell the world.
It keeps happening in numerous countries, and the controls stay on the public networks. I'm not alarmed by the idiots in charge of Iran. Its the idiots in the US that give me concern.
Too bad they were clumsy enough to be found out. It could have been perfect. The plant melts down to an unusable and flat-out dangerous blob, fully contained by the reactor housing and dome - no collateral damage.
If done right the virus/worm/trojan would erase itself and any meaningful traces.
The Iranians and Russians would be left scratching their heads.
Russia would spend billions trying to figure it out, while their potential reactor customers evaporated.
Iran? Well, did you know that every Persian rug ever made has deliberate flaws? Only allah can create perfection, and it would be blasphemous to strive for perfection.
I figured the Mossad would sneak it in on a thumb drive or printer, not by spreading it over the entire world wide web. This is a higher level of clumsy than I have come to expect of them. (Maybe it was saudi?)
The Israelis are hard to beat when it comes to technology and it would come as no surprise if they are behind this ploy along with the help of some higher power who saved their rear on a couple previous occasions such as the Deluge and the Exodus. Stuxnet is a rather sophisticated program causing me to believe that there is more involved that just some regular run of the mil computer programmers. But what left me wondering is why let it become public knowledge, for what the purpose?
No idea, but the answer to that question might be very illuminating!
Every Siemens field engineer could easily spot any deviation, format the ram and reboot. These kinds of process systems are closed, not on the net.
Even if the infection happened later, if parameters were exceeded, the PLC would have been programmed to switch from run to term and use what's called a backup prom (programmable read-only memory) until the fault was diagnosed.
Siemens is real good at this stuff and forward thinking. Industrial sabotage is nothing new to them.
bump
Good logic. So, if someone doesn’t want this simple, beautiful answer to the threat, and what they DO want is another long drawn out persian war with light sweet crude dividends, a war that would “bring us out of a depression” then they reveal the secret? That’s presuming the iranians and russkies could figure this out to stop it. But the best secret is one that is completely in the open and even if realized cannot be stopped. In a political sense the very potential this either IS or ISN’T, screws up a lot of interests.
...unless the “real” nuclear planr virus/malware has been imbedded in the Siemens “fix-it” code...:^)
Difference was we sold them defective stuff and operational software that blew up on them.
Appears that Israeli's just "wormed" their way in to this seeming success.
As in the Cold-war it helps to have technology already 3 generations ahead of what can be commonly obtained on the open, black, and post-Soviet retro-engineered market
FReegards!
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