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WH Leak Reveals Obama Created Nuclear Plant Attack Virus Now In Hands Of Hackers

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White House leaks reveal Obama created the STUXNET nuclear plant attack virus used to attack Iran which is now in the hands of the Hacker Group Anonymous.

The United States has previously declared that cyber attacks are considered acts of war and warned if China or Iran launched one against us it would be responded to with missiles.

The New York Times today put out a report that affirmed that it was in fact the US, working with Israel and to appease Israel, who developed the Stuxnet virus that attacked Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities.

The leaked information revealed that United States lost control of the rogue virus which has since ended up infecting over 100,000 computers around the world while somehow managing to evade detection by anti-virus software.

Obama went on to order work continue even after the US launched control of the virus whose source code.

The New  York Times article simply confirms what the world suspected for well over a year.

More alarming is the source code is now in the hands of the Hacker Group Anonymous and can easily be modified to attack other nuclear power plants and critical industrial infrastructure around the world.

Stuxnet: Cyber Warfare by Israel & The U.S. – A Virus That Targets Nuclear Power Plants

Only crazy psychopaths would create a self mutating computer virus that attacks industrial control systems including nuclear power plants.

Yet all fingers point to the US and Israel for creating that virus, called STUXNET, which literally has the ability to end the existence of life on earth.

To make matters worse, the Hacker Group Anonymous Claims To Have The Source Code Of This Virus.

Anonymous Warns They Have The STUXNET Nuclear Power Plant Computer Virus Source Code


The latest videos being posted on news sites for the Hacker group anonymous highlights the hackers have a copy of the STUXNET computer virus and have posted a copy of the source code online.

Read more…

 

Alyona points out the way the Times put this story together by speaking with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program as well as a range of outside experts.

And as usual, none would allow their names to be used because, as the Times wrote, “the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day”.

So what you have is another report based on anonymous sources delving out classified information.

More details from RT:

US unleashed Stuxnet cyber war on Iran to appease Israel – report

The US and Israel made the Stuxnet virus as a new kind of weapon targeted against Iran, a media investigation revealed. The operation reportedly started in the Bush era, but was intensified by Obama administration.

­The top-secret massive sabotage targeting Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility was arguably the first episode of a new age of warfare, similar to the first use of nuclear weapons or the first military drone attack, according to an investigation by the New York Times.

The newspaper interviewed current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the clandestine program called Olympic Games. None of them agreed to have his name mentioned due to the highly sensitive nature of the operation.

The US and Israeli authorship of the Stuxnet virus, which caused damage to Iranian uranium enrichment effort by destroying hundreds of centrifuges at the Natanz facility, was long hinted at by the media. The virus is estimated to have pushed back the controversial nuclear program by as much as 18 months, although skeptical assessments say the impact may have been lower.

The Olympic Games operation dates back to 2006, the NYT reports. The Bush administration at the time had its credibility at a low, after being to have falsely accused Saddam Hussein of having weapons of mass destruction. This limited the amount of international pressure Washington could put on Tehran.

At the same time Iran’s renewed enrichment of uranium made Israel extremely nervous, because it suspected the Islamic Republic would build up a stockpile of enough nuclear fuel to enrich it further to a weapons-grade level later. If Iran’s enrichment program remained unhindered, Israel would be prompted to launch a pre-emptive military attack on it and trigger a major regional war, Washington believed, as several US officials told the newspaper.

Launching a secret cyber attack on Iran and making Israelis part of the operation both bought more time for sanctions and gave Israel’s hawks a tangible alternative to trying to bomb the Natanz plant.

The report names General James E. Cartwright, who had established a small cyber operation unit inside the United States Strategic Command, as the father of Olympic Games operation. George W. Bush was skeptical over the risky and radical proposal, but nevertheless approved it.

The virus that was programmed by American and Israeli cyber weapons experts especially for the operation was more sophisticated than anything the world had seen before. Also, unlike the overwhelming majority of malware, which can only damage computer performance or steal information, the new virus could cause actual damage to machinery. The code infecting control computers at Natanz was designed to abruptly speed up or slow down the fast-spinning centrifuges, tearing them apart.

Before attacking the Iranian facilities, the people in charge of the operation reportedly tested it at several of the Energy Department’s secret national laboratories. They built a replica of the Natanz site with centrifuges similar to those used by Iran. The US obtained them from Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi after he abandoned his own nuclear program in 2003.

With proof of the potential power of the new cyber weapon at hand, the Olympic Games went into the next phase in 2008. Through agents and unsuspicious accomplices the virus was downloaded into Natanz computers and spread across the facility. It then began to occasionally destroy centrifuges, giving the impression of a series of unrelated malfunctions plaguing the enrichment site.

According to the report, Iranians facing centrifuge malfunctions were convinced that their problems were with faulty parts (which the US was actually working hard to supply to them with), incompetence or human sabotage. Some specialists were actually fired over the disruptions.

The effect Olympic Games had on the plant was also confirmed by video taken by the International Atomic Energy Agency cameras, which had been put in place to monitor Iranian activities at Natanz between inspections.

The game changed in 2010, when the virus infected a laptop of one of the engineers and later escaped into the internet, quickly spreading “in the wild”. This contingency was not expected, as the malware was supposed to infect only computers at Natanz.

The Americans blamed Israeli programmers’ contributions to the code, claiming they “went too far”, as US Vice President Joe Biden reportedly commented at a secret meeting after the news broke. It was then just a matter of time before the virus would be detected by cyber security experts, its code dissected and analyzed.

Still, President Obama ordered the operation to continue, the NYT was told. Within a week from that moment, a newer version of the virus brought down just under 1,000 Iranian centrifuges.

The report says American cyber attacks are not limited to Iran, but the focus was overwhelmingly on Tehran’s nuclear program. Obama reportedly was hesitant to expand the use of the new brand of weapon. In fact, the US is arguably the one country in the world most vulnerable to cyber attacks on its infrastructure. Pioneering such operations would give other countries and power groups a justification to target America.

­It is not clear whether the US has anything to do with the recently-discovered Flame virus. The malware is a sophisticated cyber weapon, which is believed to be part of a major spy operation in the Middle East, including Iran and Israel. Cyber security experts say a government-level effort must be behind Flame.

Cryptogon reports:

U.S. and Israel Created Stuxnet, Lost Control of It

June 1st, 2012

Via: Ars Technica:

In 2011, the US government rolled out its “International Strategy for Cyberspace,” which reminded us that “interconnected networks link nations more closely, so an attack on one nation’s networks may have impact far beyond its borders.” An in-depth report today from the New York Times confirms the truth of that statement as it finally lays bare the history and development of the Stuxnet virus—and how it accidentally escaped from the Iranian nuclear facility that was its target.

The article is adapted from journalist David Sanger’s forthcoming book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, and it confirms that both the US and Israeli governments developed and deployed Stuxnet. The goal of the worm was to break Iranian nuclear centrifuge equipment by issuing specific commands to the industrial control hardware responsible for their spin rate. By doing so, both governments hoped to set back the Iranian research program—and the US hoped to keep Israel from launching a pre-emptive military attack.

The code was only supposed to work within Iran’s Natanz refining facility, which was air-gapped from outside networks and thus difficult to penetrate. But computers and memory cards could be carried between the public Internet and the private Natanz network, and a preliminary bit of “beacon” code was used to map out all the network connections within the plant and report them back to the NSA.

That program, first authorized by George W. Bush, worked well enough to provide a digital map of Natanz and its industrial control hardware. Soon, US national labs were testing different bits of the plan to sabotage Natanz (apparently without knowing what the work was for) using similar centrifuges that had come from Libya’s Qadaffi regime. When the coders found the right sets of commands to literally shake the centrifuges apart, they knew that Stuxnet could work.

Research Credit: keti

Wired reports:

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.

[...]

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