Posted on 10/15/2010 8:22:08 AM PDT by Pride_of_the_Bluegrass
Amid the mass of published analysis of the Stuxnet virus, Iran's most obvious vulnerability to cyber-war has drawn little comment: much of the Islamic Republic runs on pirated software. The programmers who apparently cracked Siemens' industrial control code to plant malware in Iran's nuclear facilities needed a high degree of sophistication. Most Iranian computers, though, run on stolen software obtained from public servers sponsored by the Iranian government. It would require far less effort to bring about a virtual shutdown of computation in Iran, and the collapse of the Iranian economy. The information technology apocalypse that the West feared on Y2K (the year 2000) is a real possibility.
(Excerpt) Read more at atimes.com ...
Wonder if stuxnet is going to affect their petroleum handling equipment?
“Iranians, to be sure, can learn to program as well as anyone else. But a software industry depends on such preconditions as enforceable patents. The only success story for Iranian software to reach the Western media recently involves the California-trained programmers in Tehran who built the “Garshasp” video game.
As the Washington Post reported on May 21, though, the “Garshasp” project is an exception that proves the rule. “For Iranians, who live with double-digit inflation, unemployment and constant political and judicial uncertainty, enterprises that do not yield almost instant results are typically regarded as lost undertakings. There are no copyright laws, and music, movies and computer games can be freely copied, distributed and sold.”
A country that steals its software cannot build its own, even if the sort of individual who excels at software development wanted to live in Iran. Most of those who can, leave. A 2002 study reported that four out of five Iranians who received rewards in international science competitions subsequently left Iran; too few Iranians have won international awards since then to gather comparable data. In 2006, the International Monetary Fund noted that Iran had the worst brain drain of 90 countries surveyed.
Iran has so few skilled programmers that it could be that the security services do not have the capacity to distinguish sabotage from incompetence. That may explain why Tehran blames foreign intelligence services for a recent succession of economic reverses, including the near-collapse of the local markets for gold and foreign exchange.
Iran’s economy has teetered towards disaster since early 2008, as I reported at the time (Worst of times for Iran Asia Times Online, June 24, 2008). Official data at the time reported that Iranian households spent 10% more per month than they earned, a rough gauge of the size of the underground economy (smuggled consumer goods, alcohol, opium, prostitution and so forth).”
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This is a great, great article! Really informative.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2608000/posts
This war is already in full swing.
Thanks for keeping this topic on the threads here.
What isn’t said says volumes.
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