Did Stuxnet Take Out 1,000 Centrifuges At Natanz? 189
AffidavitDonda writes "In late 2009 or early 2010, Iran decommissioned and replaced about 1,000 IR-1 centrifuges in the Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP) at Natanz, implying that these centrifuges broke. Iran's IR-1 centrifuges often break, yet this level of breakage exceeded expectations and occurred during an extended period of relatively poor centrifuge performance. Although Iran has not admitted that Stuxnet attacked the Natanz centrifuge plant, it has acknowledged that its nuclear sites were subject to cyber attacks."
Maybe we will know in the future. (Score:3)
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People will manage to sell something like "cyber-defense" when all that is needed, really, is to use the good tool for the good job...
Re:Maybe we will know in the future. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really.
It sounds like a much more professional attack than previously considered.
Varying speed by itself should have just sent yield to hell. Varying speed properly with the full knowledge of the centrifuge design and construction allows to select resonating frequencies (which each centrifuge has) and keep it at those until it disintegrates. In my "previous life" doing biotech I have seen what happens when a rotor goes off balance at 50000 rpm. The effect is more or less similar to that of a hand grenade in a closed space.
Add to that the fact that a broken uranium enrichment centrifuge will leak UF6 all over the place which is highly toxic and corrosive and you have your perfect sabotage method.
There is one more question to be answered here which puts the final dots over Is and crosses the last Ts. The people who have analysed the source so far in AV companies were malware professionals, not chemists or industrial automation experts. So they left one question open - does it try to determine the frequencies or it knows them already. If it is the latter, this means that the attacker has managed to obtain the exact design of a centrifuge with the actual improvements used by Iran so Iran's nuclear programme is way leakier than we thought and everyone and their dog has that centrifuge design now (with the actual improvements done by Iran after they got it from our "allies" in Pakistan). If it is the former, the same attack can be applied to all kind's of industrial automation equipment and Siemens kit provides enough telemetry to run the attack. That is probably even scarier than the first possibility. Resonance is lovely stuff... Nothing can withstand it for a sufficiently long time.
Re:Maybe we will know in the future. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a chemist and I actually did some freelance investigation into UF6 centrifuges a while back - quite fascinating. They're tall thin cylinders, barely a handsbreadth wide, with maglev vacuum bearings and a rotation speed in excess of 100,000 RPM. The outer wall of the centrifuge experiences a million G's of acceleration, and a sweaty thumb-print can off-balance one enough to self-destruct. Also, one cylinder only enriches uranium by 1% or so, so you need to daisy-chain many hundreds together flawlessly to get pure 235 out the end.
I imagine with a system that fragile, you don't need to find the precise resonant frequency. IIRC, all stuxnet did was blip the frequency down to 0 Hz for a short time - which I imagine would eventually throw the drive off-center and cause it to fail noisily.
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My guess is that you don't have to aim for a resonance. More likely the centrifuges run at the highest anti-resonance that still damps vibration below a critical threshold. A little variance in speed could send the centrifuge out of anti-resonance and reduce damping enough that bad things happen. Especially if it was done slowly.
These suckers must be able to spin up fairly quickly in order to transition through resonance points before they can self destruct.
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I wonder how cyber defense will counter it.
Hmmm. I've got a stunning idea! How bout not plug your centrifuge into a PC based ethernet network?
My doctors blood centrifuge does not have an ethernet port. Nor does my dentist's xray machine. Nor my doctors stethoscope, nor that hammer thingy they hit your knee with to test your reflexes.
The argument used to be that the DSP based controller software required to balance the rotor required a rather high end server grade PC at least $3000 worth of pentium 75s, so we need to spread that PC cost across mu
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Most likely the blood centrifuge and the x-ray machine have ethernet ports these days. My dentist gets the X-Ray results from 1 machine right on the computer in one of the rooms. I am subscribed to an IT Support mailing list from a hospital and there are regularly 'system updates' for Windows XP systems running everything from fetal monitoring systems to sleep center monitors and these days bedside e-health systems.
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Probably the centrifuges weren't connected to the ethernet. What was connected to the net was the computers where people developped the software that they put on the controllers. That is what the virus infect, and your PIC based solution would have the same problem.
That said, connecting the centrifuges to the net seems to be a great solution to contain the damage of such attacks (and of random bugs).
Maybe we should remember the past? (Score:2)
"IDF’s Military Intelligence Unit 8200" (Score:5, Informative)
It's interesting how US was jabbing so much about cyber warfare and how they need to defend themself, and still they're the first one to attack.
From TFA, the rumored culprit is not the USA, it is "IDF’s Military Intelligence Unit 8200".
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It's interesting how US was jabbing so much about cyber warfare and how they need to defend themself, and still they're the first one to attack.
From TFA, the rumored culprit is not the USA, it is "IDF’s Military Intelligence Unit 8200".
You act as if people are willing to differentiate the two...
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You act as if people are willing to differentiate the two...
"are willing to" vs "can"? I think the latter is far more realistic.
This is a funny area to discuss, because my opinion simply doesn't matter, the act of pointing out this fact almost universally results in people assuming I oppose their personal strongly held beliefs, regardless of which side they happen to be on. Bet I get a flame or troll moderation / comment from both sides.
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Eh?
Israel has, on numerous occasions in the past, demonstrated that it's quite willing to act independently of, and sometimes contrary to the wishes and interests of, the United States. I have no idea what the actors or circumstances behind stuxnet were. But it's definitely conceivable that the IDF took the action without consulting the US. It is certainly in their best interests to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons; considering it is the publicly-stated policy and goal of the latter state to: "w
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"Tough luck, things have consequences!" the arrogant man who doesn't even have the nuts to post under an account declares.
Eh, I suppose consequences are okay as long as they only involve big countries you don't like, money and lives and not really important things like Slashdot karma.
Re:Maybe we will know in the future. (Score:5, Interesting)
By all accounts, stuxnet caused considerable trouble and delay for Iranian enrichment efforts and(at least in public) the closest anybody has gotten to figuring out who did it has basically been pointing fingers at the intersection of "people who don't like Iran" and "people who are good at computers and stuff". A reasonable strategy, to be sure; but not one that suggests they have the slightest in hard evidence to go on. Unless it was unbelievably costly to develop, that is a pretty clear win for whoever was behind it.
I'm sure US military and industrial types could think of a few (thousand) things that they really would not want that happening to, never mind the continual, low-level; but costly, stream of financial scamming and fraud, much of which is electronic and much of which is a net flow from the US to assorted offshore gangs.
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Charlie Wilson's War II (Score:2)
Iran has stepped up efforts at helping Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban and is now releasing all of its Al Qaeda terrorists back into the wilds of the Middle East, the question we should be asking, was this attack worth it if terrorism increased because of it? From what I have seen, no, we are now dealing with Iran supplying larger and larger munitions to the Taliban, 'Charlie Wilson's War' is going to have a sequel and this time the protagonist is going to be Iranian.
Similar to mixing up Baptists and Mormons (Score:2)
As for Charlie Wilson, one of the guys he funnelled money to is one of our worst enemies now (not Bin Laden, one of the Afgan Warlords instead). Wilson was an easily bribed idi
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The U.S. has caught a Iranian linked to arms smuggling for the Taliban. And some of the road side bombs the Taliban uses were linked back to Iran. I think it is more or less Iran playing the spoiler. If the Taliban ever come back in Afghanistan, Iran will point to this help as a reason for good relations...until the Taliban start murdering Hazaras again. Then the gloves will come off.
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Apparently the CIA helped train some of the Pakistani intelligence guys that helped set up the Taliban but that's getting into so fragile a link that it's a bit like blaming the Russian church for Stalin's excesses simply because he went to a seminary. The Taliban are too young to have got the money from Charlie Wilson's idiocy. They are the kids that grew up in refugee camps and then went and applied the twisted morality of a refugee c
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Apparently the CIA helped train some of the Pakistani intelligence guys that helped set up the Taliban but that's getting into so fragile a link that it's a bit like blaming the Russian church for Stalin's excesses simply because he went to a seminary.
From the wee 'pedia [wikipedia.org]: "One of the CIA's longest and most expensive covert operations was the supplying of billions of dollars in arms to the Afghan mujahideen militants. The arms included Stinger missiles, shoulder-fired, antiaircraft weapons that they used against Soviet helicopters and that later were in circulation among terrorists who have fired such weapons at commercial airliners. Between $3–$20 billion in U.S. funds were funneled into the country to train and equip troops with weapons, including
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You've also got your timeline mixed up, the Taliban as we know them today did not exist in the 1970 - early 1980s. They cropped up as a consequence of those times.
While it is a popular and highly simplistic conspirac
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The entire thing is a big ball of outdated SCADA systems held together with bubble gum and bailing wire. It can barely handle a couple fault on a hot day let alone a concerted attack (see the great NE blackout of 2003).
How could maximizing profit in a deregulated market not be the holy grail and goal of all human activity? If maximizing profit means California or NYC goes dark on occasion, so be it.
You make it sound different from absolutely every other complicated technological system in the entire capitalist world economy. Other than they happen to be delivering KWh, instead of landing aircraft, pumping drinking water, delivering food, or refining fuel.
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Where've you been the last decade. Attacking is the new defense. It's called "pre-emptive strike". In other words, blow up someone you think could probably some day maybe consider thinking about attacking you.
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Where've you been the last decade. Attacking is the new defense. It's called "pre-emptive strike". In other words, blow up someone you think could probably some day maybe consider thinking about attacking you.
"New"?
Well, ok, yeah. I guess more traditional approach would be to slaughter and enslave to keep them down, to minimize the need to to actually attack in a military sense...
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Ok, ok, it's not new. I guess what's new is that it's generally accepted as a valid way to deal with (real or imagined) threats.
When Germany tried that stunt with Poland, a world war started.
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When Germany tried that stunt with Poland, a world war started.
Back to history class for you, we were talking about:
blow up someone you think could probably some day maybe consider thinking about attacking you.
Now, that logic IS perfectly valid for the Pearl Harbor incident.
You could possibly argue absolutely everything that happened in WWII previous to Operation Barbarossa was merely the preparation for Operation Barbarossa, and Poland did happen first, so maybe on a very extreme ultra extended technicality you are sorta tangentially correct.... Naah stick to using Pearl Harbor for an example of your thesis.
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Excuse me? How was the German attack on Poland any different than the US attack on Iraq? In both cases the attacker knew very well that the attacked had no snowball-in-hell chance to ever stage any sensible attack unless he's suicidal, in both cases propaganda blew the enemy's aggression potential way out of proportion and in both cases it was a given how it has to end.
If the US should ever "pre emptively" attack China, we can talk about Pearl Harbor. Until then, it's Germany vs. Poland. Without England and
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Not entirely, Poland was not ruled by a murderous dictator. And Germany invaded Poland for Lebensraum, and never intended to give it back to the Poles. The U.S. never intended to keep Iraq. Also, Germany didn't have to keep a significant threat over Poland to keep it in line as the U.S. did. At the time, sanctions were breaking down because the dear Allies in Europe saw nothing wrong with helping re-equip Saddam. The alternative was to allow Saddam to rearm...hmm...wonder what he intended to rearm for?
Re:Maybe we will know in the future. (Score:4, Insightful)
On the one hand, hardening specific systems against electronic infiltration is probably(especially if you are willing to put up with hassles) easier and cheaper than burying them in sealed bunkers under entire mountains and other nuclear defense stuff.
On the other, it is overwhelmingly easier for just about anybody to launch petty, nibbling attacks against soft targets with minimal fear of reprisal, or even identification. A lot of such attacks even pay for themselves. The industry of nigerian scammers, spammers, PIN skimmers, etc. launches millions of such a year, some percentage of which net serious rewards, and only a trickle ever get caught. And that is largely a non-ideological private sector game. Once state actors, or ideologically driven non-state actors step up to the table, and start hitting similarly soft, but not necessarily profitable, targets, you have problems...
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Attacking is easy. Defense is hard. ( ex. Nuclear Weapons use)
Not true, numerous counterexamples; the simplest one being barricaded somewhere on a mountain with the weather on your side, batteries, ammo, a trustworthy sniper rifle, lots of food, and an internet connection (for your idle time between headshots)
Re:Maybe we will know in the future. (Score:4, Interesting)
Not true, numerous counterexamples; the simplest one being barricaded somewhere on a mountain with the weather on your side, batteries, ammo, a trustworthy sniper rifle, lots of food, and an internet connection (for your idle time between headshots)
You're either shallow enough to get burned out or deep enough to get buried. Very effective techniques for taking out pill boxes and deep fortifications were developed in the Second World War.
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assuming you yourself aren't the actual target and are just trying to avoid being collateral damage, who would know you are even on the mountain?
Being sufficiently underground with enough supplies with nobody knowing that said bunker even exists is handy.
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assuming you yourself aren't the actual target and are just trying to avoid being collateral damage, who would know you are even on the mountain?
That's nice if you are a zero value target. But if you aren't, then you can't defend yourself in that way.
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they will hunt you down
Which brings us back to why the original post was a rather bad idea:
the simplest one being barricaded somewhere on a mountain
Worst possibly situation is getting "tree-d" like that. Modern siege warfare extremely strongly favors the attacker, if for no other reason than incredibly efficient modern logistical supply. Unless you've got more than half the world supply of ... everything ... on the mountain with you when you get treed.
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Sure, being a long way away from the nuclear blast will make sure that you aren't hit by the blast wave, but it's by no means a "defense". A defense would be something that can prevent taking damage from a weapon that's targeted at you. For example, an anti-missile system or a shield. The problem is that anti-missile systems don't actually work all that well yet and no o
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Sure, being a long way away from the nuclear blast will make sure that you aren't hit by the blast wave, but it's by no means a "defense". A defense would be something that can prevent taking damage from a weapon that's targeted at you. For example, an anti-missile system or a shield. The problem is that anti-missile systems don't actually work all that well yet and no one has made a shelter that can survive a direct attack from a nuclear weapon.
Actually it can be and it's rather easy though expensive. If your opponent has, say 12,000 active nuclear weapons, then building more than 12,000 shelters, hardened and spaced out so that each shelter requires a direct hit by a nuke to take out, works. For example, if I build 50,000 missile silos, each with either a real nuclear-tipped ICBM or a decoy, then unless the foe gets good intelligence on what silos have real warheads in them, they can on average take out only a quarter of my ICBM-based nuclear wea
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Wow, did you work for the RAND corporation in the 1960's?
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Wow, did you work for the RAND corporation in the 1960's?
I'm not sure what you're implying here, but information on nuclear weapons and war strategies has been around since the 60s. I made a pretty mundane observation. Not everyone has the space of a large country with which to do such things, but the US and USSR did, as did Canada and China.
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Because it's completely unfathomable that the arabs would be intelligent enough, and good enough at math and computer programming to pull something like this off?
And that's assuming it was even a government that did it. Most computer viruses out in the wild today are the work of a single individual, after all.
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that's not actually true anymore. most of the viruses out there now a days are the work of mob related activities. They are the ones who build and control most of the botnets.
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Everything in the future will be analog. And World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
No, it will be with cybernetics, that-thing-that-fries-opponents-with-an-arc, flying cars and LOTS of slow-motion KungFu
Mission Accomplished (Score:2)
Somewhere, some guy working for the CIA/NSA/TLA just shat himself laughing.
Would Windows Security Essentials have protected? (Score:2, Interesting)
What antivirus software would have protected the victims of this virus? Kaspersky? AVG? Windows Security Essentials? ClamAV?
While on the one hand, it is important to prevent infections from becoming a massive swarm with the ability to hammer away at particular locations in a DDOS, in this particular case it seems like specific machines were infected with the goal of harming them directly. Since these machines are running on specialized hardware, it doesn't really make sense to consider StuxNet a "swarm" vir
Re:Would Windows Security Essentials have protecte (Score:4, Insightful)
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Better computer hygine like not taking media from lower security systems to higher security ones would have prevented the infection of the vulnerable machines but even the NSA has admitted that they do not have 100% control over such procedures.
No kidding [wikipedia.org]
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None. No AV kit can protect you from a single target attack.
Re:Would Windows Security Essentials have protecte (Score:4, Interesting)
You're not a high profile target.
Could your apartment door keep out an exceptional burglar who specialized in breaking into high profile objects? Could your home safe stop someone who is an expert in opening bank safes? Would someone trained in defeating multi layer security systems trip your alarm system at home?
I think none of those answers could be answered positively.
But these people do not break into your home. They got better, more profitable, targets to rob.
Likewise, nobody would "waste" 4 0day vulnerabilities just to infect YOU, and ONLY YOU (a blanket attack on multiple, nonspecific, targets is usually trivial to discover through early warning means and also quite easy to protect against).
As odd as it may sound, there's safety in numbers. The garden variety trojan is not targeted. They don't care too much who they infect, their goal is not a specific target, their goal is to infect as many machines as possible, for various reasons, but no matter what the reason, it's better (for them) to infect many instead of a specific target. Phishing, botnets, they all need many, but not specific, machines.
This is not the case here. The target was very specific and I am actually quite sure that infecting anything else with this trojan would actually have been seen as a flaw in the whole operation.
I'd guess that the malware was installed specifically where it should strike, not in the usual "release and wait" way but targeted and planted. In other words, I'd guess it would have taken a physical person to be physically present to get this rolling.
This is nothing that would affect you, or any Joe Randomsurfer for that matter.
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In the US, commerce controls the government.
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One lesson of Stuxnet is clear:
If you are going to run thousands of centrifuges, you need to migrate from Windows to a Linux distro.
We've Advanced Beyond Mere Dupes! (Score:2)
Dupes are one thing, but, wow, this is new territory.
Iran Admits Stuxnet Affected Their Nuclear Program [slashdot.org]
If the submitter had gone straight to the Google [google.com] none of this ever would have happened.
That's the old model centrifuge (Score:5, Informative)
The IR-1 is an older model centrifuge. It's basically a copy of an old URENCO design. Iran has an IR-2 and an IR-3 model, which use carbon fibre rotors, and new installations use those. Iran has at least three enrichment plants, incidentally, and they're all different. Various reports indicate replacement of the older models by newer ones, so some of this might be a routine phase-out.
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Any mechanical design that results in failure due to a speed change of 6% was prone to failure anyway. I was expecting a more sophisticated attack that would deliver process failure rather than a mechanical failure.
The term from mechanical engineering that you don't know to google / wikipedia for, is "critical speed" or for that matter "Rotordynamics" in general.
If the only limiting parameter is critical shaft speed, and "everyone knows" you can very reliably measure time / rotation speed to less than parts per billion, you wanna run right up to the limit of mechanical Q and manufacturing tolerance. Running at 6% below is ridiculously sloppy engineering, especially if process efficiency might scale as square or cube
What percentage is that? (Score:2)
Is that even 10% of their entire production capacity?
israel already has nukes (Score:2)
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Israel has had nuclear weapons since the 1960's.
iran refuses to allow IAEA inspectors in and have refused for nearly a decade.
So how many more lies do you know.
The only part I might agree with is that Israel needs to be monitored by the IAEA as well, however since the USA monitors them no one pushes the issue.
No. (Score:2)
The answer is no.
Because even if it was true (what is extremely unlikely), any confirmation of this would encourage idiots at Pentagon and similar places to write idiotic viruses and trojan horses that will end up doing nothing but creating massive epidemies among completely unrelated Windows computers.
So no it is.
Oh, and to Iranian nuclear engineers: keep all information about your facilities secret. What kind of kindergarten are you runnung there?
Iran would be happy with these rumors too (Score:3)
I think Iran -- or any other country -- would be pleased to have these kind of rumors about the damage done circulating. Disinformation or uncertainty as to the present condition of their activities can only benefit them, especially if it causes the enemy to underestimate their power. This assumes that Stux wasn't feeding back information about its activity or that another good source doesn't exist.
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Disinformation or uncertainty as to the present condition of their activities can only benefit them, especially if it causes the enemy to underestimate their power.
More importantly, it causes people to doubt their capabilities. If there existed a consensus that the Iranian nuclear project poses a danger to the whole world, there would be pressure to stop that project at any cost. If they are perceived as incompetent bunglers no one will take them seriously and the nuclear program will continue.
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Not for nuclear weapons. The whole point of nukes is to let other people know you have them; no-one wants to have to actually use the things.
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Not for nuclear weapons. The whole point of nukes is to let other people know you have them; no-one wants to have to actually use the things.
Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?
Ambassador de Sadesky: It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.
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I sincerely doubt that the OIA, the CIA, the Mossad and the like will evaluate the success or failure of Stuxnet based on what anyone posts in Slashdot, or some journalist post (unless he is recognized to have expertise in the field and/or good contacts). So the ones understimating Iran would be, at the very maximum, the general public (and now we know/have confirmation from wikileaks how little are we informed/taken in account by our governments)...
Did the centrifuges break -or the controllers? (Score:5, Insightful)
My take on this story was that the Siemens controllers were the problem. The centrifuges quit working right because the controllers went nuts, and then the controllers were careful to hide their defect.
So if Iran examined the controllers and centrifuges and figured (wrongly) that the centrifuges were the problem and replaced them, wouldn't the controllers just wreck the new ones as well? And if so, wouldn't that cause Iran to spend a lot of time replacing centrifuges again and again? It seems like that could account for some of the buying.
And of course, once the actual problem is figured out, then you need to replace the controllers and probably the centrifuges that got broken the second or third time around, and of course figure out how to keep the whole thing from happening again. Sure, you can replace the rogue controllers but how did they go bad to start with? If you don't know, this could cause a lot of extreme paranoia.
How Iran actually reacted is not clear to me, but I know what would happen if this occurred in a US factory.
If a machine broke, you'd replace the machine. If it broke again, you'd replace it again and start getting mad. If it broke again, then maybe you'd look at the controller. If it tests OK -and why would it lie to you- then you replace the centrifuge again. Etc. It might take a relatively long time to figure out that the controller is actually the problem AND that it was deliberately being subtle about it to avoid detection. The assumption with machines is that they don't lie to you. If they are good or bad, generally they will be straightforward to sort out via testing or diags.
So to start with, you have to accept the concept that yes, they can lie, before the source of the problem can begin to be understood much less dealt with.
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Iran seemed to think it could skip a few steps with off the shelf kit.
All it did was expose MS junk to the outside world and invite bad things in. Dont mix any MS products and national security. You would think after the cryptography issues in that part of the world, their older local
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Plus, since they are working with Uranium, everything gets hot and becomes rather hard to handle, repair and dispose of.
Hex is not very impressively radioactive. Not pour it on your breakfast cereal harmless, but not very impressive at all. It is almost exactly fiestaware breakfast cereal bowl level of scary. It is however horrifically toxic and usually has some unreacted HF in the process stream.
Its about a zillion times more likely a typical accident will chemically dissolve your flesh, rather than radiation burns.
I think you are also describing neutron activation which is not relevant at a U fuel processing plant. A p
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The assumption with machines is that they don't lie to you.
Naaah what got them was every mechanical engineer whom spins stuff around, from steam turbines to windmills to centrifuges knows the likely failure modes are, in order:
1) material failure / bad specs / bad material / bad machining / bad maintenance intervals
2) Everything else in the freaking universe from earthquake tremors to houseflys in the process stream to electrical surges
3) RPM / timing inaccuracy (failure is common, inaccuracy is incomprehensible)
So they started with line item #1 and probably spent
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An aspect of stuxnet's damage that has not yet been publicly recognized is that stuxnet's activities have created a drain on the pool of available centrifuge technicians.
Someone has to clean up after one of the spinners breaks. And there is only so much UF6 that the human body can tolerate.
Interesting how wikipedia says it was first spread (Score:2)
Stuxnet articles.... (Score:2)
Over the past year or more, Slashdot has been providing posts about the Stuxnet Worm. There have been several countries who have been accused of the creation of this worm, US being on the top of the list and I believe Israel being the second most accused. Just a week or two ago, China has been named as a possible suspect as well. I'm sure if you search upon Stuxnet you'll be able to find many links to many articles to find out a lot more information about the worm.
It's rather an interesting story to follo
All Truthiness (Score:2)
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These aren't the droi...weapons we're looking for?
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Sure, a diagram would be nice.
I'd also like to know the network topology of the facility in question, its connectivity to the internet and their protocols for isolating their systems from threats
Thanks for asking
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Apparently, the "virus" was not spread via network connectivity, but via payloads that piggybacked on removable media (USB sticks).
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ZING!
And I have to ask, why the heck does removable media still have so many vulnerabilities?
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Because it's viewed as more secure than network connectivity when it shouldn't be? Build a better heuristics scanner, and someone will build a more obscure/innocent-looking binary.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)
Because normal people consider removable media to contain data but MS and by extension Windows considers it something that must be executed without gaining consent from or even informing the user.
Windows must be kept locked up in a padded cell and straitjacket. If it sees a bottle marked poison, it will drink it. If it sees a pencil it'll jam it up it's nose. Give it a pillow and it'll suffocate itself.
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Well, sure, other than the part where it notifies you about the newly mounted media, and asks you if and what, if anything, you want to do with it. Or are you referring to much older and likely pirated systems that aren't being patched?
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The latest will ask, but industrial control systems are often run on XP without network access.
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ZING!
And I have to ask, why the heck does removable media still have so many vulnerabilities?
It doesn't have vulnerabilities. On my box, /etc/fstab has noexec for usb sticks. Besides, an AMD64 port binary won't do too much on my i386 port.
Oh you mean on Windows. That's mistake #1 right there.
Re:Well that was the intention of the virus (Score:5, Interesting)
Just spent a minute at wikipedia...
Apparently the virus is Windows specific and targets industrial control systems manufactured by Siemens.
They have distributed a removal tool, which is dependent on current patching from Microsoft
Of course, this soooo many questions, like;
Who else uses the same Siemens controllers, should they be worried as well?
Who holds the keys to this thing?
What is preventing anybody else from hijacking the root kitted systems?
What are the chances of any Microsoft patches being poisoned by the author?
And finally... Why the heck are our friends at Siemens selling systems to the Iranians?
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Apparently the virus is Windows specific and targets industrial control systems manufactured by Siemens.
Why the hell Siemens is running Windows for such kind of application, to begin with?
And finally... Why the heck are our friends at Siemens selling systems to the Iranians?
Friends?
Neither companies nor government have friends, they have interests.
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Why the hell Siemens is running Windows for such kind of application, to begin with?
My question exactly. Twenty years ago the standard system for such applications was the VAX/VMS and I still have to see any successful virus for the VAX/VMS. There have existed many proof-of-concept viruses and worms written for VMS, sure, but never one that caused any widespread damage.
There's a good analysis of the reasons for this here [hoffmanlabs.com]. In simple words, VMS is not quite as user-friendly as Windows and that makes all the difference.
That's the reason why I wish the "year of Linux on the desktop" will never
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ABB still support a huge number of plants running on "Conductor VMS" systems. They are so stable that the customers are reluctant to change ;)
The problem with this is that there are few spare parts, few people with the needed skills and even fewer people who know how to -properly- set up the system.
The new HMI system is called 800xA and runs on top of Windows 2003 Server. Why?
I suspect money... And the ability to actually run it in a few years time when the old DEC hardware finally goes out of production :p
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And finally... Why the heck are our friends at Siemens selling systems to the Iranians?
I don't know, but I hope they shoot 'em an even bigger load next time [/couldn't resist].
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And finally... Why the heck are our friends at Siemens selling systems to the Iranians?
What makes you think you are their friend, and who are you to tell Siemens who they should do business with?
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Well, perhaps he's a rational person who can objectively see that Iran is run by a highly belligerent, insurgency-supporting, terror-financing, arms-smuggling, mysoginistic, medieval-minded, brutally theocratic asshat of a regime willing to rig elections and kill its own protesting people in order to stay in power while it builds nuclear weapons and regularly thump its chest about wiping other countres off the map. Perhaps that's a good reason
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And finally... Why the heck are our friends at Siemens selling systems to the Iranians?
Siemens are German. Many European countries sell technology to Iran.
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1. There are a lot of perfectly legitimate uses for industrial controllers. 2. Corporations have no friends, only avarice. They may act friend-like if you are currently the highest bidder but the moment they have your money they'll turn to the next highest bidder.
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Eset has a particularly interesting paper [eset.com] on Stuxnet which may interest you.
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Who else uses the same Siemens controllers, should they be worried as well?
From my understanding of the virus when the analysis was posted a while back the virus was more specific than you can imagine. It didn't generically target Siemens systems as much as verify which actual Siemens system it was attached to. It had a very specific payload that moved quite specific control points around. I think at the time the basic thought was if you weren't the one being specifically targeted you didn't' have too much of an issue.
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Had you spent just a minute at wikipedia it would have told you that it's general purpose industrial PLC, not some specialized system tailored for one specific use. You want one? Let me google that for you: here [google.com]
That's the main problem with Stuxnet. While there are a few checks to tailor it to the specific situation in Iran, we're still talking about large volume off-the-shelf equipment. The military's used to collate
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And finally... Why the heck are our friends at Siemens selling systems to the Iranians?
Because otherwise the Russians would.
And then, good luck getting right the cyrillic encoding for the default password.
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It should also be noted that the stuxnet designers went out of their way
These would not have been easy design constraints to work under. The craft that went into stuxnet is very impressive.