The Stuxnet WormFollow

Very interesting stuff. Four pages worth of very interesting stuff so I'm not even going to bother cut & pasting.

Highlights:
-- Back in 2009 or so, a computer virus began appearing in various parts of the world. Despite its spread, it didn't seem to "do" anything.
-- Iran reported some "minor" issues with its nuclear facility as a result of the virus.
-- Reverse engineering showed that the virus only became active under very specific circumstances.
-- The very specific circumstances were those you'd only find in the Iranian facility. For example, it has code to send commands to 984 machines linked together.
-- The virus worked by recording a "status normal" screen and then displaying it for the Iranian technicians while it was in fact commanding the machines to spin their centrifuges at extreme speeds, damaging the delicate precision machinery.
-- A suspected 20% of the centrifuges in the enrichment facility were destroyed as a result of the attack.
-- Various sources are saying the virus attack set back Iran four or five years from being able to make a nuclear weapon. Besides the wasted time and repairs, it is difficult for Iran to get the materials needed due to embargoes.
-- Israel and the United States, according to various sources, were the source for the virus; collaborating so far as to involve Oak Ridge, Idaho National Laboratory and the Israeli Dimona facility where replicas of the Iranian facility were constructed and tested to see how effective the worm could be. Siemens, a German company which manufactured the centrifuge controllers, is also suspected of collaborating with the US/Israel to find exploitable weaknesses.
-- Israel is also suspected of assassinating several Iranian nuclear scientists.

Interesting stuff. Better than an air or missile strike on the facility? Who knows.

It's funny reading mass media releases about this compared to some of the real PLC technical stuff from Siemens and other Siemens users on various technical forums. I remember reading about it first over at www.plctalk.net and not really caring because our plant runs primarily Allen Bradley controls, and the few Siemens products we use are completely isolated from Ethernet or USB jump drives, pretty hard to get a virus into them.

I'm sure you can find some of the threads about it at plctalk.net if you realy wished. I didn't follow it because I didn't care too much. But I remember reading it was a pretty harmless "virus" that affected only the Windows CE version running in the background of the Siemens HMIs.

I think it's pretty neat if it really was a US/Israeli conspiracy to sabotage Iraq machinery.

Certainly less deadly.

If by suspected you mean suspected beyond a reasonable doubt. Israel has an extremely impressive and extensive covert ops network. It's proportionally much larger than the US and Russian teams during the cold war. They are also very "hands on". Getting accurate and timely numbers on it is difficult, but for reference, they had about 60 mutually confirmed kills of officials in Palestine alone in '01.

Iran and Iraq - still not the same place.

What's binary for Alef?

I honestly meant Iran. I was in a hurry to post during the end of my 10 minute break at work.

Edited, Jan 17th 2011 6:54pm by TirithRR

We're all already desensitized to Israel assassination activities. You're going to have to find something a little more distasteful to get anyone in NA to care.

More distasteful than state sponsored assasination? Thats pretty fUcking distastful imo.

Its all good tho'. As a student of history, I'm just making sure that I'm completely clear on current events that will inevitably have repurcussions in the future, so that when everybody is busy demonizing Iranians so that 'we' are happy for 'them' to be slaughtered in the name of Democracy, I, at least, will have a sense of what actually happened (as opposed to what I saw on the TV 5 minutes ago).

Personally, I like to hear about genocide. Bring up some more Israeli vs Palestinian please.

S'funny how that 'vs' makes it sound like a sports match played on a level playing field.

I'm not sure what's more adorable, paulsol: your indignation, or your condescension.

Why couldn't you live in the flood zone?

I like to think that its my condecension.

And when was the last time you heard of a rainforest on the side of a volcano being in a flood zone? D'uh.