Stuxnet Cyber attack suspected on Iranian N-plans

[Cáthasaigh]

I can't wait til the 2012 related mania kicks in. I wonder how many expectant rapturees will sign over all the goods and property, that they will no longer need, to the leftbehind.

[jmcc]

Russia, Africa and, I think, China ignored the whole thing yet on the 1st of January 2000 they weren't devastated by planes falling from the sky, hospitals shutting down or toasters burning the bread.

The problem with Y2K was that its effects were somewhat more subtle than those extreme examples. The happy-clappies who masquerade as "technology journalists" dealt with such extreme examples because understanding the software and the effects that the Y2K errors could cause was somewhat beyond their limited capabilities. There was a more visible effect on the web when as the clocks ticked over, many Javascript scripts on websites showing the current date tipped over and started displaying 1900 as the new year. But since aircraft didn't fall out of the sky and toast burned in the same old way, a few of these happy-clappies penned pieces wondering if the Y2K problem even existed.

Regards...jmcc

[jmcc]

I can't wait til the 2012 related mania kicks in. I wonder how many expectant rapturees will sign over all the goods and property, that they will no longer need, to the leftbehind.

Time for the "But you are the Messiah" clip from the "Life Of Brian".

Regards...jmcc

[Baron von Biffo]

The problem with Y2K was that its effects were somewhat more subtle than those extreme examples. The happy-clappies who masquerade as "technology journalists" dealt with such extreme examples because understanding the software and the effects that the Y2K errors could cause was somewhat beyond their limited capabilities. There was a more visible effect on the web when as the clocks ticked over, many Javascript scripts on websites showing the current date tipped over and started displaying 1900 as the new year. But since aircraft didn't fall out of the sky and toast burned in the same old way, a few of these happy-clappies penned pieces wondering if the Y2K problem even existed.

Regards...jmcc

Journalists may have created the hype but IT companies were more than willing to ride it. I was working for a very large company at the time and we paid a 7 figure fee to a company founded by a tiger poster boy to make us Y2K safe. Burning the money as a publicity stunt would have brought greater benefits. We even lost a few people from our own IT department because they saw the easy money that could be made from it.

[C. Flower]

Amhadinejad confirms that centrifuges were affected by Stuxnet.

http://www.breakingnews.ie/world/ahm...rk-483770.html

[musashi]

Discovering zero-day vulnerabilities rarely happens by chance. It requires a very specific type of expertise. Compiling a worm to utilize several zero-days as part of its attack vector suggests an organisation, not an individual as the source of the Stuxnet worm.

now...which organisation will benefit most by attacking Irans's nuclear program.

[C. Flower]

Discovering zero-day vulnerabilities rarely happens by chance. It requires a very specific type of expertise. Compiling a worm to utilize several zero-days as part of its attack vector suggests an organisation, not an individual as the source of the Stuxnet worm.

now...which organisation will benefit most by attacking Irans's nuclear program.

Obama has been focusing intelligence on Cyberwar and channelling funds into it since the beginning of his administration.

[musashi]

Obama has been focusing intelligence on Cyberwar and channelling funds into it since the beginning of his administration.

An organisation that could develop such an asset, would likely be financed by a post-industrial nation-state...

Given the sophistication of the Stuxnet worm, some experts believe that only a nation-state could be behind the malware. The United States and Israel have been named as two countries that have such capability and political motive for carrying out such an attack.

With its discoverey, the malware's threat has probably passed, though it represents a significant developement in cyber-security. "I believe that it's not a threat right now," says Robert McMillan. "Whoever it was designed to hit, has been hit. The thing that's important about Stuxnet is that ... this is the first piece of malware that was designed to go after critical infrastructure."

[Captain Con O'Sullivan]

'Israel has tested a computer worm believed to have sabotaged Iran's nuclear centrifuges and slowed its ability to develop an atomic weapon, The New York Times reported on Saturday.

In what the Times described as a joint Israeli-U.S. effort to undermine Iran's nuclear ambitions, it said the tests of the destructive Stuxnet worm had occurred over the past two years at the heavily guarded Dimona complex in the Negev desert.

The newspaper cited unidentified intelligence and military experts familiar with Dimona who said Israel had spun centrifuges virtually identical to those at Iran's Natanz facility, where Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium.

"To check out the worm, you have to know the machines," an American expert on nuclear intelligence told the newspaper". The reason the worm has been effective is that the Israelis
tried it out." '

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomac...plant-1.337276

[Andrew49]

Cyber warfare has been taken to a new, hard rockin' level. According to one security expert, a computer virus has attacked computer systems in Iran and forced them to play heavy metal, at full volume, during the middle of the night. The computer worm reportedly compromises the machines, and makes them repeat the track 'Thunderstruck' by AC/DC, ad nauseum. The unconfirmed report, picked up by Gawker, comes from Mikko Hypponen, who is a researcher at the Finnish security company F-Secure.

Is a Computer Worm Causing Iranian Nuclear Facilities to Blast AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’ At Night?

News From the Lab

[jmcc]

Cyber warfare has been taken to a new, hard rockin' level. According to one security expert, a computer virus has attacked computer systems in Iran and forced them to play heavy metal, at full volume, during the middle of the night. The computer worm reportedly compromises the machines, and makes them repeat the track 'Thunderstruck' by AC/DC, ad nauseum. The unconfirmed report, picked up by Gawker, comes from Mikko Hypponen, who is a researcher at the Finnish security company F-Secure.

Guess the are saving "Rock The Casbah" for when they mean business.

Regards...jmcc

[Andrew49]

Guess the are saving "Rock The Casbah" for when they mean business.

Regards...jmcc

When dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega took refuge in the Vatican Embassy in Panama in December 1989, the US Army used Van Halen to force him out. Reportedly the song “Panama” by Van Halen was played repeatedly, as was “I Fought The Law” by The Clash.

I think it's time for the Mullahs to get acquainted with the Torture Playlist!

[Andrew49]

Cyberattack on Saudi firm, U.S. Sees Iran firing back.

The hackers picked the one day of the year they knew they could inflict the most damage on the world’s most valuable company, Saudi Aramco, Lailat al Qadr, or the Night of Power — celebrating the revelation of the Koran to Muhammad.

That morning, at 11:08, a person with privileged access to the Saudi state-owned oil company’s computers, unleashed a computer virus to initiate what is regarded as among the most destructive acts of computer sabotage on a company to date. The virus erased data on three-quarters of Aramco’s corporate PCs — documents, spreadsheets, e-mails, files — replacing all of it with an image of a burning American flag.

Source

Needless to say Iran is being blamed for this but it's obvious when you read more on the story that it was more likely an employee/employees inside the company that is responsible: a bragging list of all PCs that became infected was forwarded to a computer within the network under attack!

[musashi]

fascinating

Shamoon’s code included a so-called kill switch, a timer set to attack at 11:08 a.m., the exact time that Aramco’s computers were wiped of memory. Shamoon’s creators even gave the erasing mechanism a name: Wiper.

Computer security researchers noted that the same name, Wiper, had been given to an erasing component of Flame, a computer virus that attacked Iranian oil companies and came to light in May. Iranian oil ministry officials have claimed that the Wiper software code forced them to cut Internet connections to their oil ministry, oil rigs and the Kharg Island oil terminal, a conduit for 80 percent of Iran’s oil exports.

It raised suspicions that the Aramco hacking was retaliation. The United States fired one of the first shots in the computer war and has long maintained the upper hand. The New York Times reported in June that the United States, together with Israel, was responsible for Stuxnet, the computer virus used to destroy centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear facility in 2010.

Last May, researchers discovered that Flame had been siphoning data from computers, mainly in Iran, for several years. Security researchers believe Flame and Stuxnet were written by different programmers, but commissioned by the same two nations.

If American officials are correct that Shamoon was designed by Iran, then clues in its code may have been intended to misdirect blame. Shamoon’s programmers inserted the word “Arabian Gulf” into its code. But Iranians refer to that body of water as the Persian Gulf and are very protective of the name. (This year, Iran threatened to sue Google for removing the name Persian Gulf from its online maps.)