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Stuxnet a precision, military-grade cyber missile
The Stuxnet malware has infiltrated industrial computer systems worldwide. Now, cyber security sleuths say it’s a search-and-destroy weapon meant to hit a single target. One expert suggests it may be after Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant.
CSM
By Mark Clayton
Cyber security experts say they have identified the world’s first known
cyber super weapon designed specifically to destroy a real-world target –
a factory, a refinery, or just maybe a nuclear power plant.
The cyber worm, called Stuxnet, has been the object of intense study
since its detection in June. As more has become known about it, alarm
about its capabilities and purpose have grown. Some top cyber security
experts now say Stuxnet’s arrival heralds something blindingly new: a
cyber weapon created to cross from the digital realm to the physical
world – to destroy something.
At least one expert who has
extensively studied the malicious software, or malware, suggests Stuxnet
may have already attacked its target – and that it may have been Iran’s
Bushehr nuclear power plant, which much of the world condemns as a
nuclear weapons threat.
The appearance of Stuxnet created a ripple of amazement
among computer security experts. Too large, too encrypted, too complex
to be immediately understood, it employed amazing new tricks, like
taking control of a computer system without the user taking any action
or clicking any button other than inserting an infected memory stick.
Experts say it took a massive expenditure of time, money, and software
engineering talent to identify and exploit such vulnerabilities in
industrial control software systems.
Unlike most malware, Stuxnet
is not intended to help someone make money or steal proprietary data.
Industrial control systems experts now have concluded, after nearly four
months spent reverse engineering Stuxnet, that the world faces a new
breed of malware that could become a template for attackers wishing to
launch digital strikes at physical targets worldwide. Internet link not
required.
“Until a few days ago, people did not believe a directed
attack like this was possible,” Ralph Langner, a German cyber-security
researcher, told the Monitor in an interview. He was slated to present
his findings at a conference of industrial control system security
experts Tuesday in Rockville, Md. “What Stuxnet represents is a future
in which people with the funds will be able to buy an attack like this
on the black market. This is now a valid concern.”
A gradual dawning of Stuxnet’s purpose
It is a realization that has emerged only gradually.
Stuxnet
surfaced in June and, by July, was identified as a hypersophisticated
piece of malware probably created by a team working for a nation state,
say cyber security experts. Its name is derived from some of the
filenames in the malware. It is the first malware known to target and
infiltrate industrial supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA)
software used to run chemical plants and factories as well as electric
power plants and transmission systems worldwide. That much the experts
discovered right away.
But what was the motive of the people who created it? Was Stuxnet
intended to steal industrial secrets – pressure, temperature, valve, or
other settings –and communicate that proprietary data over the Internet
to cyber thieves?
By August, researchers had found something more
disturbing: Stuxnet appeared to be able to take control of the automated
factory control systems it had infected – and do whatever it was
programmed to do with them. That was mischievous and dangerous.
But
it gets worse. Since reverse engineering chunks of Stuxnet’s massive
code, senior US cyber security experts confirm what Mr. Langner, the
German researcher, told the Monitor: Stuxnet is essentially a precision,
military-grade cyber missile deployed early last year to seek out and
destroy one real-world target of high importance – a target still
unknown.
“Stuxnet is a 100-percent-directed cyber attack aimed at destroying an
industrial process in the physical world,” says Langner, who last week
became the first to publicly detail Stuxnet’s destructive purpose and
its authors’ malicious intent. “This is not about espionage, as some
have said. This is a 100 percent sabotage attack.”
A guided cyber missile
On his website, Langner lays out the
Stuxnet code he has dissected. He shows step by step how Stuxnet
operates as a guided cyber missile. Three top US industrial control
system security experts, each of whom has also independently
reverse-engineered portions of Stuxnet, confirmed his findings to the
Monitor.
“His technical analysis is good,” says a senior US
researcher who has analyzed Stuxnet, who asked for anonymity because he
is not allowed to speak to the press. “We’re also tearing [Stuxnet]
apart and are seeing some of the same things.”
Other experts who
have not themselves reverse-engineered Stuxnet but are familiar with the
findings of those who have concur with Langner’s analysis.
“What
we’re seeing with Stuxnet is the first view of something new that
doesn’t need outside guidance by a human – but can still take control of
your infrastructure,” says Michael Assante, former chief of industrial
control systems cyber security research at the US Department of Energy’s
Idaho National Laboratory. “This is the first direct example of
weaponized software, highly customized and designed to find a particular
target.”
“I’d agree with the classification of this as a weapon,”
Jonathan Pollet, CEO of Red Tiger Security and an industrial control
system security expert, says in an e-mail.
One researcher’s findings
Langner’s
research, outlined on his website Monday, reveals a key step in the
Stuxnet attack that other researchers agree illustrates its destructive
purpose. That step, which Langner calls “fingerprinting,” qualifies
Stuxnet as a targeted weapon, he says.
Langner zeroes in on
Stuxnet’s ability to “fingerprint” the computer system it infiltrates to
determine whether it is the precise machine the attack-ware is looking
to destroy. If not, it leaves the industrial computer alone. It is this
digital fingerprinting of the control systems that shows Stuxnet to be
not spyware, but rather attackware meant to destroy, Langner says.
Stuxnet’s
ability to autonomously and without human assistance discriminate among
industrial computer systems is telling. It means, says Langner, that it
is looking for one specific place and time to attack one specific
factory or power plant in the entire world.
“Stuxnet is the key
for a very specific lock – in fact, there is only one lock in the world
that it will open,” Langner says in an interview. “The whole attack is
not at all about stealing data but about manipulation of a specific
industrial process at a specific moment in time. This is not generic. It
is about destroying that process.”
So far, Stuxnet has infected
at least 45,000 computers worldwide, Microsoft reported last month. Only
a few are industrial control systems. Siemens this month reported 14
affected control systems, mostly in processing plants and none in
critical infrastructure. Some victims in North America have experienced
some serious computer problems, Eric Byres, an expert in Canada, told
the Monitor. Most of the victim computers, however, are in Iran,
Pakistan, India, and Indonesia. Some systems have been hit in Germany,
Canada, and the US, too. Once a system is infected, Stuxnet simply sits
and waits – checking every five seconds to see if its exact parameters
are met on the system. When they are, Stuxnet is programmed to activate a
sequence that will cause the industrial process to self-destruct,
Langner says.
Stuxnet infects 30,000 industrial computers in Iran: report
The Stuxnet computer worm has
infected 30,000 computers in Iran but has failed to “cause serious
damage,” Iranian officials were quoted as saying on Sunday.
Some
30,000 IP addresses have been infected by Stuxnet so far in Iran,
Mahmoud Liayi, head of the information technology council at the
ministry of industries, was quoted as saying by the government-run paper
Iran Daily.
NATO member aligning itself with Russia
Move by Turkey gives Putin way to keep treaty organization at arm’s length
Editor’s Note: The following report is excerpted from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, the premium online newsletter published by the founder of WND. Subscriptions are $99 a year or, for monthly trials, just $9.95 per month for credit card users, and provide instant access for the complete reports.
As Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, turns away from its Western links, it is aligning itself more and more with Iran, Syria and Russia, especially because of its quickly developing energy and trade connections to the central part of what was the old Soviet Union, according to a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
From a strategic standpoint, the development gives Moscow an opportunity to further undermine a plan by NATO to spread its security arrangement further east in a region Moscow considers to be its sphere of influence.
During a recent visit to Moscow to meet with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed multi-billion dollar agreements on trade and energy.
While both parties agreed to increase trade from the current $35 billion to $100 billion within the next five years, the most significant development was an agreement in their strategic relationship on energy cooperation.
In addition to concessions on various pipelines between the two countries, Erdogan pledged to pursue Russian construction and operation of Turkey’s first nuclear power plant.
Keep in touch with the most important breaking news stories about critical developments around the globe with Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, the premium, online intelligence news source edited and published by the founder of WND.
The Turks were left with little choice but to involve Russia more in its energy future, given that Turkey imports some 70 percent of its natural gas from Russia.
That dependency also gives the Russians considerable political and economic leverage over Ankara and increases Moscow’s influence over Europe’s energy future through greater control of existing and proposed pipelines that provide European countries with more than 40 percent of their energy needs.
Various pipelines with Turkish participation as a gate to the West, however, are but one source of control Russia is exhibiting over the Turks.
The more significant one is Russia’s proposal to construct and operate Turkey’s first nuclear power plant.
Erdogan and Putin signed a commitment to construct the nuclear power plant, even though there is some domestic opposition due to the existing heavy reliance on Russia for energy.
The plant is to be built on the Mediterranean coast near Akkuyu. A consortium to construct the nuclear power plant includes Russia’s Atomstroyexport, Inter Rao Eus and Turkey’s Park Teknik.
Putin said that Russia had “significant advantages over the competition” to build the nuclear plant in Turkey. In one sense, he was alluding to the virtual energy grip Moscow enjoys over Ankara.
For the complete report and full immediate access to Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, subscribe now.
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‘Germany believes Iran could have nuclear bomb within 6 months’
HAARETZ
By Assaf Uni,
Iran is capable of assembling an atomic bomb within six months, German intelligence analysts told the German weekly newsmagazine Stern.
“If they want to, they will be able to set off a uranium bomb within six months,” an analyst with Germany’s intelligence service, Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), told the magazine.
German intelligence officials told Stern believe Iran has “mastered” every stage of uranium enrichment and that they have activated enough centrifuges to produce sufficient quantities of weapons-grade uranium for at least one atomic bomb.
“Nobody would have thought this possible some years ago,” an intelligence official told Stern.
The UN Security Council has imposed three sets of sanctions on Tehran for defying its demands to suspend uranium enrichment.
Some analysts say Iran may be close to having the required material for producing a bomb, but most say the weaponization process would then take one to two years due to technical and political hurdles.
“Weaponizing” enrichment would not escape the notice of UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), unless it was done at a secret location.
Until now there have been no indications of any such covert diversion, a point made by the IAEA’s incoming director-general shortly after his election earlier this month.
Current IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has said it is his “gut feeling” that Iran is seeking at least the capability to build nuclear weapons, in order to protect itself from perceived regional and U.S. threats.
Libyan leader: Peaceful nuclear program should be encouraged
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi says Iran should be encouraged to pursue its nuclear program as long as it is for peaceful purposes.
Gadhafi was addressing Wednesday’s opening session of a summit of the Non-Aligned Movement at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik. The 118-nation group includes Iran.
He said it is “unjust” to stop Iran from enriching uranium for peaceful purposes, but that it must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
The United States and Israel say Iran is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. Iran denies the charge, saying its program is for generating power.
Libya in 2003 abandoned its own program to develop nuclear and chemical weapons.
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Pariah states collaborating on nukes?
FROM WND
North Korea suspected of helping Burma
Editor’s Note: The following report is excerpted from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, the premium online newsletter published by the founder of WND. Subscriptions are $99 a year or, for monthly trials, just $9.95 per month for credit card users, and provide instant access for the complete reports.
 |
LONDON — MI6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, believes North Korea is helping Burma, the world’s other pariah state, to build a nuclear weapon, according to a report in Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
This not only breaks international laws against providing such assistance but the decision by both countries to work together on developing Burma’s nuclear capability has increased tension around the Pacific Rim.
Defense Analyst Bertil Linter said: “Both countries have absolutely no interest in obeying UN arms embargos.”
Linter added: “North Korea is one of the few countries still trading militarily with Burma now that China has become reluctant to sell certain types of equipment to the junta. It is becoming increasingly clear that Burma is intending to become one of a new generation of rogue states threatening nuclear war.”
This week NSA satellites, which monitor the South Pacific, have been tracking a heavily laden North Korean cargo ship, Kang Name 1, which sailed from the guarded military port at Changyon south of the country’s capital, Pyongyang. It is heading towards Burma.
The ship left North Korean water two weeks ago. Satellite surveillance images had been downloaded to NSA and GCHQ, Britain’s spy in the sky.
Keep in touch with the most important breaking news stories about critical developments around the globe with Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, the premium, online intelligence news source edited and published by the founder of WND.
From its base outside Cheltenham, some of GCHQ’s 7,000 specialists have become part of a major intelligence gathering operation against the 16,000-ton ship.
U.S. Naval warships and at least one U.S. Navy submarine are tracking the rusty-hulled freighter.
Long-range surveillance planes have shadowed it down the South China Sea as it heads towards the Bay of Bengal in Burma.
After being sifted and analyzed, the GCHQ specialists send the surveillance data to MI6 for further study.
The material includes documents and video footage showing newly built tunnels being constructed in the Arakan Yoma mountain range in the country. MI6 analysts believe the tunnels could be part of the controversial nuclear program by the Burmese junta.
Thakhin Chan Tun, a former Burmese ambassador in North Korea and now an outspoken critic of the regime, has confirmed the claim.
“To put it bluntly, Burma wants to get the technology to develop a nuclear bomb.” he said last week.
For the complete report and full immediate access to Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, subscribe now.
Experts Find Soviet Parts in North Korean Missile
WASHINGTON
With concerns rising about a possible North Korean long-range missile test this weekend, two independent scientists say the regime may be using an old Soviet ballistic missile to boost a rocket capable of reaching the West Coast of the United States.
North Korea is not known to have nuclear warheads and faces years of research and testing before building such a reliable weapon.
But the scientists say that if North Korea does have such a Russian-made ballistic missile in its arsenal, it could modify the rocket into a two-stage missile that could reach Seattle, Wash., carrying a 900-kilogram warhead, or San Francisco carrying a 700-kilogram charge.
The design of a long-range missile tested by North Korea last April “represents a very significant advance in rocket technology,” said Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Ted Postol and Union of Concerned Scientists’ David Wright in a June 29 assessment published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
Using data and imagery from North Korea’s April 4 launch, Postol and Wright calculated that the second stage of the North Korean rocket had the external dimensions, engine power and key features of an SS-N 6, a Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missile first deployed in 1968.
Their theory is at odds with U.S. officials’ skepticism of the recent North Korean long-range missile launch, dismissed as a failure.
Missile expert and former U.N. arms inspector Mike Elleman cautioned against assuming that the similarities between the external dimensions of the North Korean second stage and the SS-N 6 mean that the two are the same technology.
But Elleman added that the coincidence is hard to explain.
Geoffrey Forden, another missile expert with MIT, sees merit in the Russian missile theory and believes North Korea may have its own production line for SS-N 6 missile components.
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Axelrod claims Iran has nuclear weapons
FROM WND
Top Obama adviser’s statement contradicts official U.S., Israeli estimates
 David Axelrod |
In an apparent mistake, President Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod stated during an interview yesterday there are nuclear weapons in Iran which are a threat to the entire world.
No country has ever claimed Iran currently has a nuclear arsenal. A 2007 U.S. intelligence estimate previously claimed Iran halted its nuclear weapons-related work in 2003, although that report was highly criticized. Other American agencies have stated Iran could obtain nukes by 2013 or later.
Israel maintains Iran could have enough enriched uranium to produce a nuclear weapon in less than a year, although other Israeli estimates put the timeline at 2012.
Axelrod, meanwhile, said yesterday in little noticed comments to ABC News that there are already nuclear weapons in Iran.
“I think the president’s sense of solicitude with those young people has been very, very clear, and we’re very mindful of that,” said Axelrod.
“We are also mindful of the fact that the nuclear weapons in Iran and the nuclearization of that whole region is a threat to that country, all countries in the region, and the world. And we have to address that. We can’t let that lie,” he said.
Axelrod was responding to a question from ABC News’ Chief Washington Correspondent George Stephanopoulos about whether U.S. talks with Iran’s leadership would undermine the opposition movement in Tehran.
The White House did not immediately respond to a WND query about whether the U.S. has new information indicating Iran possesses nuclear weapons.
An Israelis security official said there was no indication Iran currently possesses a nuclear weapon.
Axelrod wasn’t the only Obama administration official yesterday to declare the U.S. is still open to discussions with Iran over its disputed nuclear program despite Tehran’s violent crackdown on post-election protests.
Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said yesterday the legitimacy of the Iranian government is not the “critical issue” in Washington’s dealings with Tehran.
“We are concerned for our own national interests to ensure that Iran doesn’t pursue its nuclear program,” she told CBS News. “It is in the United States’ national interest to make sure that we have employed all elements at our disposal, including diplomacy, to prevent Iran from achieving that nuclear capacity.”
Rice said Iran must decide whether to end its alleged nuclear weapons program and rejoin the international community or “face increased isolation and pressure.”
Why the world will never run out of energy
Oct 28
Posted by Chris Thomas
WND
Editor’s Note: The following report is excerpted from Jerome Corsi’s Red Alert, the premium online newsletter published by the current No. 1 best-selling author, WND staff writer and columnist. This week, he is including a Chapter Three excerpt from his book, “America for Sale.” Red Alert subscriptions are $99 a year or $9.95 per month for credit card users. Annual subscribers will receive a free autographed copy of “The Late Great USA,” a book about the careful deceptions of a powerful elite who want to undermine our nation’s sovereignty.
Oil remains so abundant that it is unlikely the world will ever run out, Jerome Corsi’s Red Alert reports.
Economist Julian Simon, former professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, was famous for taking a contrarian position on energy resources, arguing that our perception of scarcity was not validated by the current or historical factual record of energy abundance.
In an essay titled “When Will We Run Out of Oil? Never!” Simon argued against Malthusian fears that peak oil theorists were right and sooner or later the pumps would run dry, as environmental alarmist Paul Ehrlich frequently argued.
Simon traced fears of energy resource exhaustion back to an 1865 book published in London by W. Stanley Jevons, one of the 19th century’s greatest social scientists, titled “The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-mines.” Jevons argued that Great Britain’s industrial progress would grind to a halt because industry would soon use all available coal. Jevons further concluded that there was no chance oil would be an alternative resource able to solve the problem.
“What happened?” Simon asked.
His answer: “Because of the perceived future need for coal and because of the potential profit in meeting that need, prospectors searched out new deposits of coal, investors discovered better ways to get coal out of the earth, and transportation engineers developed cheaper ways to move the coal.”
Similarly, Simon traced the fears in the United States back to an 1885 U.S. geological survey that declared there was “little or no chance” oil would ever be found in California. In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior argued U.S. oil resources would be exhausted in 13 years. Then, when that prediction proved a false alarm, the Department of the Interior revised its estimate and declared that it was from 1951 that U.S. oil would be exhausted in 13 years.
Simon argued gloomy predictions about running out of oil, coal or any other energy resource including natural gas, were typically wrong for several reasons, including the following:
“Simon’s energy resource analysis essentially maintains that we will be running automobiles with nuclear batteries long before we run out of oil,” Corsi wrote. “Another point consistent with Simon’s analysis is that technologies have been developed permitting the clean burning of coal, while coal resources in the United States yet remain among the most abundant on the earth. In the final analysis, nuclear power is the final inexhaustible energy resource.
“Moreover, the development of nuclear power plants to provide electricity to U.S. cities on a scale developed in nations such as France would serve the dual purpose of providing infrastructure jobs that conceivably could match the jobs created by President Eisenhower’s decision to build the interstate highway system, while providing cheap, safe and efficient energy to satisfy our municipal needs indefinitely.”
Today, the U.S. Navy runs ships around the world predominately on nuclear power, without a history of life- or environmental-threatening accidents.
Simon wrote: “Of course nuclear power can replace coal and oil entirely, which constitutes an increase in efficiency so great that it is beyond my powers to portray the entire process on a single graph based on physical units.”
Corsi noted that the one energy resource that is truly renewable and sufficiently robust to produce the energy required in the 21st century is nuclear power.
He said the example environmentalists and radical global warming alarmists typically neglect is France, a country that since the 1980s has built a network of modern nuclear power plants needed to power France’s major cities for the foreseeable future. Today, approximately 80 percent of France’s electricity is generated by 59 nuclear plants across the country that are at least a generation more advanced that the nuclear power plants operating today in the United States.
“As with the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the nightmare scenarios with nuclear power are now decades old,” Corsi wrote. “The Three Mile Island accident occurred in Pennsylvania in 1979, and the Chernobyl reactor meltdown occurred in the Soviet Union in 1986. The world has experienced no similar incidents with nuclear energy since then.”
Red Alert’s author, whose books “The Obama Nation” and “Unfit for Command” have topped the New York Times best-sellers list, received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in political science in 1972. For nearly 25 years, beginning in 1981, he worked with banks throughout the U.S. and around the world to develop financial services marketing companies to assist banks in establishing broker/dealers and insurance subsidiaries to provide financial planning products and services to their retail customers. In this career, Corsi developed three different third-party financial services marketing firms that reached gross sales levels of $1 billion in annuities and equal volume in mutual funds. In 1999, he began developing Internet-based financial marketing firms, also adapted to work in conjunction with banks.
In his 25-year financial services career, Corsi has been a noted financial services speaker and writer, publishing three books and numerous articles in professional financial services journals and magazines.
For financial guidance during difficult times, read Jerome Corsi’s Red Alert, the premium, online intelligence news source by the WND staff writer, columnist and author of the New York Times No. 1 best-seller, “The Obama Nation.“
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