Posted on 01/17/2011 6:05:57 AM PST by markomalley
The Stuxnet worm, a piece of computer malware that may have seriously delayed the building of an Iranian nuclear weapon, appears to have been created through a joint effort by the United States and Israel, according to The New York Times.
Stuxnet caused Iran’s centrifuges to spin wildly out of control while simultaneously making it appear that nothing was wrong. The worm was possibly tested at Israel’s Dimona complex, the birthplace of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear deterrent, before going on to destroy approximately a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. “The attackers took great care to make sure that only their designated targets were hit,” German computer security expert Ralph Langner told the Times. “It was a marksman’s job.”
According to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the worm has only caused “minor problems with some of (Iran’s) centrifuges.” International experts like Langner beg to differ. “Code analysis makes it clear that Stuxnet is not about sending a message or proving a concept,” he wrote. “It is about destroying its targets with utmost determination in military style.”
Both the United States and Israel have reportedly studied Iran’s uranium enrichment laboratories in an effort to exploit critical flaws within Tehran’s nuclear program. Iran uses the P-1 centrifuge, built by Pakistan and based on blueprints stolen from Dutch scientists in the 1970s. The man who originally stole the blueprints, a Pakistani metallurgist named A.Q. Khan, illegally sold P-1 machines to Iran, North Korea, and Libya. At some point, Israel seems to have procured an unknown number of P-1 centrifuges and began testing them at the remote Dimona facility. In 2003, Libya surrendered its P-1 machines to the United States, which began working with the centrifuges and looking for weaknesses. The Stuxnet virus appears to be the result of these American and Israeli efforts to study the P-1.
“To check out the worm, you have to know the machines,” an American expert on nuclear intelligence told the Times. “The reason the worm has been effective is that the Israelis tried it out.”
Israeli intelligence has often warned that Iran was on the verge of building a bomb. Now, according recently retired Israeli spy chief Meir Dagan, Iran may not be able to build a bomb until 2015. It seems the delay is largely attributable to the devastating Stuxnet worm.
Although neither the United States nor Israel have taken credit for Stuxnet, some officials have publicly rejoiced at the news. Gary Samore, President Obama’s chief strategist for combating weapons of mass destruction, told a conference on the Iranian nuclear program that he is “glad to hear they are having troubles with their centrifuge machines, and the U.S. and its allies are doing everything we can to make it more complicated.”
I heard the whole detailed story about this worm. It was fascinating.
Leave it to the bigmouth NYT to spill the beans.
How many ships is the NYT responsible for sinking?
Why can’t the NYT tell when to refrain from spilling and when to spill?
Does it exercise no professionalism whatsoever?
obamao saved us! Rejoice!
/sarc
lol....That headline’s a little awkward considering the age of cyberspace.
How dare you put the terms “New York Times” and “professionalism” in the same post! Don’t you realize that’s unfair and degrading to even those practitioners of the “oldest profession”!
(just teasin’)
very interesting. I can’t wait to hear the whole story some day.
I agree I went too far.
Bush's fault.
I've read several detailed accounts of stuxnet. Sounds pretty bogus. More likely the iranians are suffering from institutional incompetence. High tech engineering can be very difficult when management is prone to believing in absurd interpretations of reality. The beauty of it is no matter if someone in the program gets rational, some powerful idiot in the gov't or religious power structure will interpret that rationality as an affront to the status quo, screwing the project over and over again.
The worm explanation is probably cover for sane people in the project who don't really want it too succeed...fortunately for them the Times is covering the consensual reality - therefore it must be true.
“Sounds pretty bogus.”
It may be, I don’t know. It still was a great story though.
Agreed, the NYT is the greatest news paper our enemies have on their side. Doesn’t matter who the enemy may be, the NTY will print stories undermining our security every time they get a chance.
Speaker Boehner, convene a Congressional committee to assess the case for a charge of treason against the editor of the NYT.
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