Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran 415
diewlasing sends this excerpt from the NY Times:
"From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America's first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program. Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran's Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet."
Re:Why would anyone ..... (Score:3, Informative)
They didn't. Agents infiltrated the facility, in person, in order to introduce the software.
Then, it escaped, because, allegedly, some unwitting Iranian scientist at the facility inadvertently infected his own laptop, while they were attempting to debug the centrifuges. He then brought the laptop home, as the story goes, and connected the infected laptop to the internet, using his personal residential internet connection.
Re:Uhm, so we're at war now with Iran? (Score:5, Informative)
I know what happened in a lot of meetings I never personally attended. Participants talk, transcripts are shared, etc. I suspect this info came second or third-hand from the people under Panetta.
Re:Uhm, so we're at war now with Iran? (Score:5, Informative)
that's exactly why this isn't anything even close to offical. even assuming Panetta told his underlings what "really happened" (which itself sounds a bit dodgy for the director of the freakin CIA), second-hand or third-hand info is suspect as hell.
Re:Why would anyone ..... (Score:2, Informative)
Why would anyone place critical hardware on the internet?
They didn't. Stuxnet was apparently brought into the system physically on the infected flash drives of some Russian contractors working on it.
Re:Why would anyone ..... (Score:5, Informative)
Why would anyone place critical hardware on the internet? I'm going to assume by now that Iran has figured out that the US is trying to sabotage their equipment. You would think that Iran would take any sensitive equipment offline and avoid applying any patches from foreign sources.
Have you been sleeping during the past coverage of Stuxnet, and the analysis by researchers? Stuxnet was introduced using infected USB sticks.
Re:Where are all the naysayers (Score:4, Informative)
The people you talk about are probably on the payroll, we had some forums once and every time we got a little anti American or anti Isreal two posters would always pop up and defend them. It seemed it was their only posts ever. Now eventually me and a friend did some research and found out there are large numbers of people employed to just give Isreal and the USA good press on the net.
Re:I am ashamed to be an american (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_ajax
Every single thing that we complain about Iran being is our fucking fault and now we blatantly continue with our evil foreign policy.
Every single thing that I was told this country stood for is a lie.
Someone should post that link every time someone spews "Islam is evil. They hate us for our freedoms."
Re:Uhm, so we're at war now with Iran? (Score:5, Informative)
No, you don't understand the rules: It's not an act of war when we do it to them, only when they do it to us.