Saturday, June 2, 2012

First admit committing cyber warfare using Stuxnet , Stuxnet successor and most recently Flame virus cyber weapons ( Acts of War ) against Iran , then identify branches of government involved n cyber warfare , then demand all concessions before talks commence on June 17th - this is our WH on the drug of choice - reelection

http://www.juancole.com/2012/06/behind-the-usisraeli-cyberattacks-on-iran.html


Behind the US/Israeli Cyberattacks on Iran

Posted on 06/03/2012 by Juan
Megha Rajagopalan writes at ProPublica
The New York Times [has] published a report detailing how the Bush and Obama administrations created the cyberweapon known as Stuxnet and used it to disrupt Iran’s uranium enrichment program.
Much has been written about Stuxnet, which, as ProPublica recently reported, remains a threat beyond Iran. But the Times account, based on interviews with unnamed U.S. and Israeli officials, is the most extensive account to date of U.S. cyberwarfare capabilities. Here’s our cheat sheet on what’s new and the fallout:
  • Because of Stuxnet’s complexity, cybersecurity analysts have long suspected it was a U.S.-Israeli effort. The Times story confirms this for the first time, disclosing that the project was code-named “Olympic Games.”
  • Olympic Games began under the Bush administration, and during development, it was known as “the bug.”
  • President Obama has repeatedly expressed concern that if the U.S. acknowledges it is behind Stuxnet, it would give terrorists and enemy states a justification for their own attacks.
  • Stuxnet was introduced into Iran’s enrichment facility at Natanz by an unwitting Iranian. “It turns out there is always an idiot around who doesn’t think much about the thumb drive in their hand,” a source told the Times.
    • To test the bug in secret Department of Energy labs, the U.S. used aging centrifuges handed over in 2003 by Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, making them into replicas of the nuclear enrichment facilities Iran used.
    • The attack on Iran became the first known instance of the U.S. using computer code to physically damage another country’s infrastructure. Obama, the Times writes, “was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade.”
    • The Israeli role in the attack came from a military unit called Unit 8200that had “technical expertise that rivaled” the U.S. National Security Agency’s as well as significant intelligence about Iran’s nuclear facilities.
    • When a programming error made Stuxnet’s code public in 2010, Obama considered halting Olympic Games altogether. But in the end, the administration decided to accelerate the attacks.
    • It’s unclear who was responsible for the programming error, but some in the Obama administration blamed the Israelis. The Times names Vice President Joe Biden:  “Mr. Biden fumed. ‘It’s got to be the Israelis,’ he said. ‘They went too far.’ ”
    • American officials claim that Flame, an even more complex piece of computer malware that has also attacked Iranian infrastructure, is not part of Olympic Games — but they didn’t explicitly deny it was an American project.
    • Opinion is divided as to whether Olympic Games was successful in slowing uranium enrichment in Iran. Administration officials said they had set the Iranians back 18 months to two years, but other experts sayenrichment levels quickly recovered and that Iran today has enough fuel for five or more weapons with additional enrichment.
    The Obama administration has long emphasized the importance of domestic cybersecurity, but recent statements show an increasing openness about offensive capabilities. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged last month that government hackers had attacked Al Qaeda propaganda sites in Yemen, changing information in ads that talked about killing Americans to show how many Yemenis had died in Al Qaeda attacks. 
    For years, the Iranians had no idea they were being attacked, blaming their own workers or faults in their facilities, The Times said. But because Stuxnet was inadvertently released, any government— not to mention any hacker with spare time and a malicious streak — can create their own mutation of the weapon.
    As the Times points out, “No country’s infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States.” Siemens makes specialized industrial controllers that were targeted by the Olympic Games attacks. As Siemens confirmed to ProPublica, the same hardware and software holes Stuxnet took advantage of in Iran exist in thousands of locations in the U.S. and worldwide. The vulnerable equipment controls everything from natural gas pipelines to refineries and power transmission lines.  
    American cybersecurity experts have long warned that it’s only a matter of time before someone turns an equally destructive cyberweapon on our own systems. Now that Stuxnet’s origins are clear, the odds of that happening might be even higher.
    Contributing: Peter Maass of ProPublica
    and....




http://news.antiwar.com/2012/06/01/obama-ordered-computer-virus-attacks-against-iran/


Obama Ordered Computer Virus Attacks Against Iran

Decided Program Would Continue After Stuxnet Disaster

by Jason Ditz, June 01, 2012
Adding fuel to the speculation that the Flame Virus is a government-created weapon, new reports reveal that President Obama ordered the launch of “cyberattacks” using computer malware as one of his first acts as president.
US dalliances into this sort of attack are of course well established, with the 2010 leak of the Stuxnet worm causing worldwide havoc. The worm, a joint creation of the US and Israel, was meant to target Iran’s uranium enrichment facility and was developed to attack Siemens computers. After its escape, it was altered by other groups and attacked Siemens computers worldwide, including in the United States.
Apparently even getting caught out on the Stuxnet disaster didn’t phase Obama, who ordered the program to continue even after this. The US is also said to have used viruses to attack Iran’s Russian built Bushehr power plant, bizarre since the president has insisted that the US doesn’t object to the energy program.
After initial confirmation from unnamed officials in the media, the US has denied any role in the Flame Virus, which is spreading across the Middle East. The virus, one of the most advanced ever seen, allows the attacker to capture keystrokes and screenshots, and even to turn on the microphones of affected systems to record conversations happening nearby.

and throwing your Middle East  Ally Israel under the bus isn't wise - If you're Qatar or the Saudis , what would you conclude the WH will do if it's expeditie.......

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/06/obama-ordered-stuxnet-continued/



Report: Obama Ordered Stuxnet to Continue After Bug Caused It to Spread Wildly

Despite an error in the Stuxnet worm that attacked Iran’s uranium enrichment program, which caused the malware to spread wildly out of control and infect computers outside of Iran in 2010, President Barack Obama ordered U.S. officials who were behind the attack to continue the operation.

That was despite the fact that Stuxnet was spreading to machines in the United States and elsewhere and could have contained other unknown errors that might affect U.S. machines.
The information comes in a new report from The New York Times, which asserts that an error in the code led it to spread to an engineer’s computer after it was hooked up to systems controlling the centrifuges at Iran’s uranium enrichment plant near Natanz. When the engineer left the Natanz facility, he spread it to other machines, writes Times reporter David Sanger, based on a book he has written that will be released next week.
Sources told Sanger that they believed the Israelis introduced the error in the code.
“We think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” an unidentified U.S. source reportedly told the president, “and we don’t know if we were part of that activity.”
Vice President Joe Biden accused the Israelis of going “too far,” a source told Sanger.
According to the Times, Obama wondered to advisers whether the attack should be discontinued after Stuxnet began spreading, believing the operation might have been irrevocably compromised.
“Should we shut this thing down?” Obama reportedly asked at a meeting in the White House Situation Room that included Biden and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta.
But aides advised him that it should proceed since it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and the sabotage was still working.
At the time, security researchers were still furiously trying to figure out what Stuxnet was designed to do, and hadn’t yet discovered that it was attacking the centrifuges in Iran. They would later determine that it was very targeted code that was tailor-made to attack only machines in Iran’s enrichment program. Although it infected more than 100,000 computers in and out of Iran, it didn’t do damage to those computers. But given that U.S. authorities appeared to be unclear about what the Israelis might have done to change the code, the exchange between Obama and his advisors seems to indicate that Obama gave the order to continue without the administration knowing precisely whether the code might damage other machines outside of Iran.

In weeks following that meeting, Sanger writes, while researchers at Symantec in the United States were still examining the code, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm. A few weeks after Stuxnet was detected and disclosed in July 2010, the malware temporarily took out about 1,000 centrifuges in Iran.
The ongoing cyberattack authorized by Obama coincided with the Administration and members of Congress chastising China for its supposed roles in cyber-intrusions into government contractors, human rights groups and Western corporations. The Times piece notes that Obama was aware and concerned that the government’s forays into cyberattacks would give justification to Iran, China and other entities conducting similar attacks against the United States.


According to the Times the first Stuxnet attacks were launched in 2008, a date that is much earlier than previously believed. But those early attacks were small. No two attacks were alike so they caused confusion among the Iranians, who couldn’t figure out the source of problems that were occurring with centrifuges.
By the time President Bush left office in January 2009, the operation had still not accomplished wholesale destruction of centrifuges, and the outgoing president urged Obama to continue the operation.
The story provides new details that expand on a story that Sanger reported in January 2011 when he wrote that Bush had authorized the cybersabotage plan against Iran before he left office, but that Obama had accelerated it once he was inaugurated in January 2009. Sanger had previously written in 2011 that Israel and the United States had worked on the plan in partnership, and had tested it using centrifuges that had been seized from Libya’s defunct nuclear enrichment operations in 2003, which were the same model of centrifuges being used at Natanz.
Sanger’s latest story gets a little confusing in places. It jumps around in time and the organization of it makes it sound as if centrifuges were destroyed at Natanz before Bush left office at the beginning of 2009.
But reports from the U.N.’s nuclear monitoring agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, indicate that centrifuges weren’t destroyed until much later, likely beginning in the early fall of 2009, after Obama took office.
Because Sanger doesn’t provide actual dates in his story, it’s difficult to determine when exactly events are taking place that he describes. The piece indicates, however, that the Obama administration knew the worm had escaped Natanz before the worm was publicly disclosed in July 2010.

Researchers have uncovered a version of the worm that appeared to have been first launched in June 2009. In March 2010, the attackers launched a new more aggressive wave of attacks against Natanz, that researchers also recovered. It was this version of the worm that spread Natanz wider than intended and eventually led to its discovery.
Sanger describes at least two subsequent attacks of the code after it spread. This coincides with what researchers have found. They say a slightly different version of Stuxnet was released again in April 2010 and that a version of its driver was discovered in July 2010, signed with a new digital certificate, suggesting another version of Stuxnet might have been released at that time.
Sanger doesn’t say what the error was that caused Stuxnet to spread. But researchers found that the attackers added a number of zero-day exploits to the code in the March 2010 attack that hadn’t been in the code previously. These allowed the worm to spread automatically to many machines on the same network as well as to machines on separate networks.
According to the Times, the first stage of the attack operation involved the use of a cyberespionage tool, which Sanger calls a beacon, to siphon intelligence about Natanz’s operations and technical configurations so that Stuxnet could be tailored to attack it. Sanger doesn’t mention the name of this “beacon,” but researchers in Hungary last year discovered a piece of malware they dubbed DuQu, which many believe was the precursor to Stuxnet and was used to gain information from machines in Iran to design the Stuxnet code.
What Sanger describes, however, is code that was placed in control systems made by Siemens, that were being used at Natanz. The beacon was designed to map the operation of the controllers and create an electrical blueprint of the Natanz plant, and send the data back to the National Security Agency. This intelligence-gathering stage took months, according to the Times.
DuQu, however, was not designed to infect Siemens systems and was found on computers that were not running Siemens software. Most researchers also believe that the espionage part of the plot against the centrifuges began outside of Natanz, and that the infection spread from contractors to computers at Natanz, not the other way around.

According to sources who spoke with Sanger, Flame, the most recently discovered malware found infecting targeted machines in Iran and other Middle East countries, was not part of operation Olympic Games and declined to acknowledge whether the United States was behind it.
and.....





http://news.antiwar.com/2012/06/01/cia-department-of-energy-behind-program-to-attack-iran-computers/


CIA, Department of Energy Behind Program to Attack Iran Computers

Officials Say Move 'Preferable Alternative to Airstrikes'

by Jason Ditz, June 01, 2012
Details continue to pour in about the Obama Administration’s decision to authorize a hostile computer hacking campaign against Iran, one of the first decisions he made upon taking office.
The most public of the attacks, Stuxnet, which was also an embarrassment since it quickly spread beyond the Iranian nuclear program and started attacking industrial computers across the planet, was created by the CIA, with the help of the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory.
Israeli experts were also involved in the creation of the Stuxnet worm, and while this fact has been floating around over a year, officials are just now getting around to confirming it.
US officials have defended the move, saying they believed it was a “preferable alternative to airstrikes,” but the enormous damage such viruses have caused when they inevitably move beyond the target and start attacking computers worldwide suggest it isn’t exactly a panacea either.
Despite the damage of the Stuxnet fiasco, the Obama Administration has continued the program. Though it has yet to be confirmed, it is widely believed that the Flame Virus, an advanced surveillance program, is also a product of this scheme.
And we decide to tell the world and Iran that we created / helped create Stuxnet and sent it out to cause havoc in not just Iran but elsewhere in the world ( thereby admitting to committing an act of war by the way against Iran ) and having made this insane admission - we now want Iran to make concessions before the next round of talks in Moscow  ? Are decisionmakers in the Administration abusing bath salts ......

http://news.antiwar.com/2012/06/01/clinton-demands-iran-offer-concessions-before-moscow-talks/


Clinton Demands Iran Offer Concessions Before Moscow Talks

Negotiation 'Have Never Been About Intentions or Sincerity'

by Jason Ditz, June 01, 2012

Speaking today in Norway, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that Iran had to offer all of the concessions that the US sought before the June 17 Moscow talks, and that nothing short of this would be acceptable.
“Our negotiations with Iran have never been about intentions or sincerity,” Clinton admitted, adding that the US would decide before the Moscow talks begin whether or not Iran’s concessions are sufficient to placate them.
Exactly what the US demands are at any given moment aren’t all that clear, as officials will hint at deals and then insist that they are “obviously” not going to accept anything short of full abandonment of their civilian program.
Clinton’s new position is being presented as a “deadline” for Iran, but she wasn’t clear if the US intended to attack Iran ahead of the Moscow talks or simply to continue stonewalling any P5+1 agreements to spite Iran for not knuckling under sooner.




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