Hey, dude! They promised us pizza if we can do this!
Posted on 09/29/2010 5:52:44 AM PDT by Errant
Tehran this week secretly appealed to a number of computer security experts in West and East Europe with offers of handsome fees for consultations on ways to exorcize the Stuxnet worm spreading havoc through the computer networks and administrative software of its most important industrial complexes and military command centers. debkafile's intelligence and Iranian sources report Iran turned for outside help after local computer experts failed to remove the destructive virus. None of the foreign experts has so far come forward because Tehran refuses to provide precise information on the sensitive centers and systems under attack and give the visiting specialists the locations where they would need to work. They were not told whether they would be called on to work outside Tehran or given access to affected sites to study how they function and how the malworm managed to disable them. Iran also refuses to give out data on the changes its engineers have made to imported SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems, mostly from Germany. The impression debkafile sources gained Wednesday, Sept. 29 from talking to European computer experts approached for aid was that the Iranians are getting desperate. Not only have their own attempts to defeat the invading worm failed, but they made matters worse: The malworm became more aggressive and returned to the attack on parts of the systems damaged in the initial attack.
One expert said: "The Iranians have been forced to realize that they would be better off not 'irritating' the invader because it hits back with a bigger punch."
Looking beyond Iran's predicament, he wondered whether the people responsible for planting Stuxnet in Iran - and apparently continuing to offload information from its sensitive systems - have the technology for stopping its rampage. "My impression," he said, "is that somebody outside Iran has partial control at least on its spread. Can this body stop malworm in its tracks or kill it? We don't have that information at present, he said.
As it is, the Iranian officials who turned outside for help were described by another of the experts they approached as alarmed and frustrated. It has dawned on them that the trouble cannot be waved away overnight but is around for the long haul. Finding a credible specialist with the magic code for ridding them of the cyber enemy could take several months. After their own attempts to defeat Stuxnet backfired, all the Iranians can do now is to sit back and hope for the best, helpless to predict the worm's next target and which other of their strategic industries will go down or be robbed of its secrets next.
While Tehran has given out several conflicting figures on the systems and networks struck by the malworm - 30,000 to 45,000 industrial units - debkafile's sources cite security experts as putting the figure much higher, in the region of millions. If this is true, then this cyber weapon attack on Iran would be the greatest ever.
I’m quite familiar with PLCs; my employer makes some.
I meant, Why wouldn’t Russia plant the bug in the first place?
Then get paid for the clean up.
LOL!
Limbaugh said the Iranians were running pirated Windows on the infected computers which must be in the thousands
Fill us in... Was that a defeat?
Mullahs got worms!
Kaspersky Labs appears to agree. From their press release last Friday:
The inside knowledge of SCADA technology, the sophistication of the multi-layered attack, the use of multiple zero-day vulnerabilities and legitimate certificates bring us to an understanding that Stuxnet was created by a team of extremely skilled professionals who possessed vast resources and financial support.The target of the attack and the geography of its outbreak (primarily Iran) suggests that this was not a regular cyber-criminal group. Moreover, our security experts who analyzed the worm code insist that Stuxnet’s primary goal was not to spy on infected systems, but to conduct sabotage. All the facts listed above indicate that Stuxnet development was likely to be backed by a nation state, which had strong intelligence data at its disposal.
For the Muslims, yes.
Ah, Creative Zionism!
Thanks, I’ll have to read up on it!
Hussien, you had to visit Russian porn... You've killed us all!
What was your first clue?
cough, cough...DEBKA...cough, cough...
I been reading from a lot of places that this virus hit a lot of stuff. But they have claimed it did not hit their nuclear targets.
i would consider this article very much in line with other sources of information I have read.
lol...
Iran's first nuclear power plant to begin supplying energy not before early 2011, a senior official said Wednesday • This delay of several months caused by a computer virus which has affected Iran.
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