Obama declares cyber-war on Iran!

[Christians4LessGvt]

Iran is under cyber threat as
Obama offers nuclear negotiations

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report

September 23, 2010, 1:26 PM (GMT+02:00)


Deadly new Stuxnet, soldier in cyber war

By choosing US President Barack Obama and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deliver the
opening addresses at the UN General Assembly session in New York Thursday, Sept. 23,
the UN secretariat told the world that Iran's drive for nuclear bomb dominated world affairs
at this time.

debkafile's military and intelligence sources note in this regard the US press leaks appearing
since Monday, Sept. 20, which maintain that the United States has embarked on a clandestine
cyber war against Iran and that Israel has established elite cyber war units for this purpose.

According to our Washington sources, Obama has resolved to deal with the nuclear impasse
with Iran by going after the Islamic republic on two tracks: UN and unilateral sanctions for
biting deep into the financial resources Iran has earmarked for its nuclear program, and
a secret cyber war which the US is conducting jointly with Israel for crippling its nuclear facilities.

In New York, quiet exchanges are ongoing with Ahmadinejad's delegation for renewing the
Six Power talks on Iran's banned uranium enrichment program.  he US offer to go back to
the negotiating table was made against a background of deliberately leaked revelations
by US security sources to US media regarding the recruitment of Israel military and
security agencies of cyber raiders with the technical knowhow and mental toughness
for operating in difficult and hazardous circumstances, such as assignments for stealing
or destroying enemy technology, according to one report.

debkafile's sources disclose that Israel has had special elite units carrying out such
assignments for some time. Three years ago, for instance, cyber raiders played a
role in the destruction of the plutonium reactor North Korea was building at A-Zur
in northern Syria.

On Monday, too, the Christian Science Monitor and several American technical journals
carried revelations about a new virus called Stuxnet capable of attacking and severely
damaging the servers of large projects, such as power stations and nuclear reactors.

All the leaked reports agreed on three points:

1.  Stuxnet is the most advanced and dangerous piece of Malware every devised.

2.  The experts don't believe any private or individual hackers are capable of
producing this virus, only a high-tech state such as America or Israel.

3.   Although Stuxnet was identified four months ago, the only servers known
to have been affected and seriously damaged are located in Iran.

Some computer security specialists report lively speculation that the virus was invented
specifically to target part of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure, either the Bushehr nuclear
plant activated last month or the centrifuge facility in Natanz.

debkafile's sources add: Since August, American and UN nuclear watchdog sources have
been reporting a slowdown in Iran's enrichment processing due to technical problems which
have knocked out a large number of centrifuges and which its nuclear technicians have been
unable to repair. It is estimated that at Natanz alone, 3,000 centrifuges have been idled.

None of the reports indicate whether other parts of Iran's nuclear program have been affected
by Stuxnet or the scale of the damage it may have caused.

[Christians4LessGvt]

Of course several days later the regular media "catches up" with Debka!

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jam2yTGb8W1t53gQ6S-RbSquSmiAD9IFORD00

[BT]

Who has a high level of computer security sophistication and an interest in attacking Iranian industrial control systems? Some speculate it's the US, but most of the speculation centers on the Israelis.

http://blogs.pcmag.com/securitywatch/2010/09/whos_behind_stuxnet_the_americ.php

[Plane]

   The CIA was a pioneer of this kind of attack, but that was decades ago, now the capability is more widespread.

    Can the Iranian engineers depend on their calculations now? Can automated processes be depended on to perform correctly? Can they ever be certain that the worm is exterminated?

    If they can't get this confidence , can they build a bomb that could be diluted enough to fizzle or enriched too much so that it detonates early?

[Christians4LessGvt]

Cyber attack on Iran expands:
Tehran threatens long-term war in reprisal

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report

September 27, 2010


Stuxnet spreads to Bushehr an personal computers

Iran admitted Monday, Sept. 27 it was under full-scale cyber terror attack. The official IRNA
news agency quoted Hamid Alipour, deputy head of Iran's government Information Technology
Company, as saying that the Stuxnet computer worm "is mutating and wreaking further havoc
on computerized industrial equipment."

Stuxnet was no normal worm, he said: "The attack is still ongoing and new versions of this virus
are spreading."

Revolutionary Guards deputy commander Hossein Salami declared his force had all the defensive
structures for fighting a long-term war against "the biggest and most powerful enemies" and was
ready to defend the revolution with more advanced weapons than the past.  He stressed that
defense systems have been designed for all points of the country, and a special plan devised
for the Bushehr nuclear power plant. debkafile's military sources report that this indicates that
the plant - and probably other nuclear facilities too - had been infected, although Iranian officials
have insisted it has not, only the personal computers of its staff.

The Stuxnet spy worm has been created in line with the West's electronic warfare against Iran,"
said Mahmoud Liayi, secretary of the information technology council of the Industries Minister.

As for the origin of the Stuxnet attack, Hamid Alipour said: The hackers who enjoy
"huge investments" from a series of foreign countries or organizations, designed the worm,
which has affected at least 30,000 Iranian addresses, to exploit five different security
vulnerabilities. This confirmed the impressions of Western experts that Stuxnet invaded
Iran's Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems through "zero-day" access.

Alipour added the malware, the first known worm to target large-scale systems and industrial
complexes control systems, is also a serious threat to personal computers.

debkafile's Iranian and intelligence sources report that these statements are preparing the ground
for Tehran to go beyond condemning the states or intelligence bodies alleged to have sponsored
the cyber attack on Iranian infrastructure and military industries and retaliate against them militarily.
Iran is acting in the role of victim of unprovoked, full-scale, cyber terror aggression.

[Christians4LessGvt]

An alarmed Iran asks for outside
help to stop rampaging Stuxnet malworm

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report

September 29, 2010, 10:07 AM


Iran on cyber red alert after failing to vanquish Stuxnet

Tehran this week secretly appealed to a number of computer security experts in West and East Europe
with offers of handsome fees for consultations on ways to exorcize the Stuxnet worm spreading havoc
through the computer networks and administrative software of its most important industrial complexes
and military command centers. debkafile's intelligence and Iranian sources report Iran turned for outside
help after local computer experts failed to remove the destructive virus.

None of the foreign experts has so far come forward because Tehran refuses to provide precise information
on the sensitive centers and systems under attack and give the visiting specialists the locations where they
would need to work. They were not told whether they would be called on to work outside Tehran or given
access to affected sites to study how they function and how the malworm managed to disable them. Iran
also refuses to give out data on the changes its engineers have made to imported SCADA
(Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems, mostly from Germany.

The impression debkafile sources gained Wednesday, Sept. 29 from talking to European computer experts approached
for aid was that the Iranians are getting desperate. Not only have their own attempts to defeat the
invading worm failed, but they made matters worse: The malworm became more aggressive and returned to the attack
on parts of the systems damaged in the initial attack.

One expert said: "The Iranians have been forced to realize that they would be better off not 'irritating' the invader
because it hits back with a bigger punch."

Looking beyond Iran's predicament, he wondered whether the people responsible for planting Stuxnet in Iran - and
apparently continuing to offload information from its sensitive systems - have the technology for stopping its rampage.
"My impression," he said, "is that somebody outside Iran has partial control at least on its spread. Can this body stop
malworm in its tracks or kill it? We don't have that information at present, he said.

As it is, the Iranian officials who turned outside for help were described by another of the experts they approached
as alarmed and frustrated. It has dawned on them that the trouble cannot be waved away overnight but is around
for the long haul. Finding a credible specialist with the magic code for ridding them of the cyber enemy could take
several months. After their own attempts to defeat Stuxnet backfired, all the Iranians can do now is to sit back
and hope for the best, helpless to predict the worm's next target and which other of their strategic industries will
go down or be robbed of its secrets next.

While Tehran has given out several conflicting figures on the systems and networks struck by the malworm - 30,000 to
45,000 industrial units - debkafile's sources cite security experts as putting the figure much higher, in the region of millions.
If this is true, then this cyber weapon attack on Iran would be the greatest ever.

[Christians4LessGvt]

In a Computer Worm, a Possible Biblical Clue

Thursday, 30 Sep 2010 | 8:06 AM ET

By: John Markoff and David E. Sanger - The New York Times
 
Deep inside the computer worm that some specialists suspect is aimed at slowing Iran's race for a nuclear weapon lies what could be a fleeting reference to the Book of Esther, the Old Testament
tale in which the Jews pre-empt a Persian plot to destroy them.
 
That use of the word "Myrtus" which can be read as an allusion to Esther to name a file inside the code is one of several murky clues that have emerged as computer experts try to trace the origin and purpose of the rogue Stuxnet program, which seeks out a specific kind of command module for industrial equipment.

Not surprisingly, the Israelis are not saying whether Stuxnet has any connection to the secretive cyberwar unit it has built inside Israel's intelligence service. Nor is the Obama administration, which while talking about cyberdefenses has also rapidly ramped up a broad covert program, inherited from the Bush administration, to undermine Iran's nuclear program. In interviews in several countries, experts in both cyberwar and nuclear enrichment technology say the Stuxnet mystery may never be solved.

There are many competing explanations for myrtus, which could simply signify myrtle, a plant important to many cultures in the region. But some security experts see the reference as a signature allusion to Esther, a clear warning in a mounting technological and psychological battle as Israel and its allies try to breach Tehran's most heavily guarded project. Others doubt the Israelis were involved and say the word could have been inserted as deliberate misinformation, to implicate Israel.

"The Iranians are already paranoid about the fact that some of their scientists have defected and several of their secret nuclear sites have been revealed," one former intelligence official who still works on Iran issues said recently. "Whatever the origin and purpose of Stuxnet, it ramps up the psychological pressure."

So a calling card in the code could be part of a mind game, or sloppiness or whimsy from the coders.

The malicious code has appeared in many countries, notably China, India, Indonesia and Iran. But there are tantalizing hints that Iran's nuclear program was the primary target. Officials in both the United States and Israel have made no secret of the fact that undermining the computer systems that control Iran's huge enrichment plant at Natanz is a high priority. (The Iranians know it, too: They have never let international inspectors into the control room of the plant, the inspectors report, presumably to keep secret what kind of equipment they are using.)

The fact that Stuxnet appears designed to attack a certain type of Siemens industrial control computer, used widely to manage oil pipelines, electrical power grids and many kinds of nuclear plants, may be telling. Just last year officials in Dubai seized a large shipment of those controllers known as the Simatic S-7 after Western intelligence agencies warned that the shipment was bound for Iran and would likely be used in its nuclear program.

"What we were told by many sources," said Olli Heinonen, who retired last month as the head of inspections at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, "was that the Iranian nuclear program was acquiring this kind of equipment."

Also, starting in the summer of 2009, the Iranians began having tremendous difficulty running their centrifuges, the tall, silvery machines that spin at supersonic speed to enrich uranium and which can explode spectacularly if they become unstable. In New York last week, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, shrugged off suggestions that the country was having trouble keeping its enrichment plants going.

Yet something perhaps the worm or some other form of sabotage, bad parts or a dearth of skilled technicians is indeed slowing Iran's advance.

The reports on Iran show a fairly steady drop in the number of centrifuges used to enrich uranium at the main Natanz plant. After reaching a peak of 4,920 machines in May 2009, the numbers declined to 3,772 centrifuges this past August, the most recent reporting period. That is a decline of 23 percent. (At the same time, production of low-enriched uranium has remained fairly constant, indicating the Iranians have learned how to make better use of fewer working machines.)

Computer experts say the first versions of the worm appeared as early as 2009 and that the sophisticated version contained an internal time stamp from January of this year.

These events add up to a mass of suspicions, not proof. Moreover, the difficulty experts have had in figuring out the origin of Stuxnet points to both the appeal and the danger of computer attacks in a new age of cyberwar.

For intelligence agencies they are an almost irresistible weapon, free of fingerprints. Israel has poured huge resources into Unit 8200, its secretive cyberwar operation, and the United States has built its capacity inside the National Security Agency and inside the military, which just opened a Cyber Command.

But the near impossibility of figuring out where they came from makes deterrence a huge problem and explains why many have warned against the use of cyberweapons. No country, President Obama was warned even before he took office, is more vulnerable to cyberattack than the United States.

For now, it is hard to determine if the worm has infected centrifuge controllers at Natanz. While the S-7 industrial controller is used widely in Iran, and many other countries, even Siemens says it does not know where it is being used. Alexander Machowetz, a spokesman in Germany for Siemens, said the company did no business with Iran?s nuclear program. "It could be that there is equipment", he said in a telephone interview. "But we never delivered it to Natanz."

But Siemens industrial controllers are unregulated commodities that are sold and resold all over the world the controllers intercepted in Dubai traveled through China, according to officials familiar with the seizure.

Ralph Langner, a German computer security consultant who was the first independent expert to assert that the malware had been "weaponized" and designed to attack the Iranian centrifuge array, argues that the Stuxnet worm could have been brought into the Iranian nuclear complex by Russian contractors.

"It would be an absolute no-brainer to leave an infected USB stick near one of these guys," he said, "and there would be more than a 50 percent chance of having him pick it up and infect his computer."

There are many reasons to suspect Israel's involvement in Stuxnet. Intelligence is the single largest section of its military and the unit devoted to signal, electronic and computer network intelligence, known as Unit 8200, is the largest group within intelligence.

Yossi Melman, who covers intelligence for the newspaper Haaretz and is at work on a book about Israeli intelligence over the past decade, said in a telephone interview that he suspected that Israel was involved.

He noted that Meir Dagan, head of Mossad, had his term extended last year partly because he was said to be involved in important projects. He added that in the past year Israeli estimates of when Iran will have a nuclear weapon had been extended to 2014.

"They seem to know something, that they have more time than originally thought," he said.

Then there is the allusion to myrtus which may be telling, or may be a red herring.

Several of the teams of computer security researchers who have been dissecting the software found a text string that suggests that the attackers named their project Myrtus. The guava fruit is part of the Myrtus family, and one of the code modules is identified as Guava.

It was Mr. Langner who first noted that Myrtus is an allusion to the Hebrew word for Esther. The Book of Esther tells the story of a Persian plot against the Jews, who attacked their enemies pre-emptively.

"If you read the Bible you can make a guess," said Mr. Langner, in a telephone interview from Germany on Wednesday.

Carol Newsom, an Old Testament scholar at Emory University, confirmed the linguistic connection between the plant family and the Old Testament figure, noting that Queen Esther's original name in Hebrew was Hadassah, which is similar to the Hebrew word for myrtle. Perhaps, she said, "someone was making a learned cross-linguistic wordplay."

But other Israeli experts said they doubted Israel's involvement. Shai Blitzblau, the technical director and head of the computer warfare laboratory at Maglan, an Israeli company specializing in information security, said he was convinced that Israel had nothing to do with Stuxnet.

"We did a complete simulation of it and we sliced the code to its deepest level," he said. "We have studied its protocols and functionality. Our two main suspects for this are high-level industrial espionage against Siemens and a kind of academic experiment."

Mr. Blitzblau noted that the worm hit India, Indonesia and Russia before it hit Iran, though the worm has been found disproportionately in Iranian computers. He also noted that the Stuxnet worm has no code that reports back the results of the infection it creates. Presumably, a good intelligence agency would like to trace its work.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/39435594/

[Christians4LessGvt]

XO....don't read this...you can read it in one of
your favorite rags when the rest of the media catches up!

Ahmadinejad Plots Military Attack on Israel

Unable to Fight the Cyber Worm, Iran Is Bent on Revenge

As Tehran gropes in the dark for a solution to the crisis caused by the malignant Stuxnet cyber worm to its vital
strategic systems, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is reported by Iranian sources as having warned Syrian
President Bashar Assad when they met last in Damascus that he is gearing up for military revenge. Tehran's allies
Syria, Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza should get ready, he said. for Israel to take it as an opportunity to
attack them.

Their conversation took place Saturday, Sept. 18, three days after word of the software invasion surfaced.
Our sources add that the Iranian president admitted he did not know who was responsible for the cyber attack -
and may never find out - but he is certain that either Israel or the United States, or both, launched it to stop
Iran's nuclear program in its tracks. Even if it was Israel, he said, Washington would have known and approved.

Ahmadinejad described the damage to Iran's nuclear and military resources as more devastating than the Israel
raid on Syria's plutonium reactor at A-Zur exactly three years ago.

He reminded Assad that then, too, Israel and the US had worked together to destroy the Syrian-Iranian nuclear
plant under construction by North Korea. Israeli cyber commando units, he said, simultaneously raided additional
Syrian nuclear facilities and made off with nuclear materials, equipment and software which they passed to the
United States.

Ahmadinejad schedules attack on Israel for early October

This, said Ahmadinejad, was the second time in three years that the US and Israel have jointly attacked Iran's
nuclear program - and that is one time too many. Tehran is resolved this time not to let them get away with
fighting the Islamic republic without even declaring war.

He told Assad that although the form the Iranian attack on Israel had not been finally worked out, it would probably
take place during the first half of October at around the dates of his scheduled state visit to Lebanon on Oct. 13-14.

Less than a week after this conversation, the Iranian president stood up at the UN General Assembly and said,
"Most people believe the US government was responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001." Another theory,
he said, was that "some segments within the US government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining
American economy and [strengthen] its grip on the Middle East in order to save the Zionist regime."

In Tehran, our sources disclose, these outrageous remarks were later presented to political and military circles as
Iran's first response to the cyber attack. Twenty-four hours later Tehran came clean about it - and not by chance.
Wednesday, Sept. 29, Washington responded to the saber-rattling in Tehran.

Top Iranians accused of murder, torture, beating, rape

President Barack Obama signed an executive order imposing sanctions on eight Iranian officials held responsible
for serious human rights abuses, including the killing, torture, beating and rape of Iranian citizens since the country's
disputed 2009 presidential election. Note that this was the first time Washington had singled out top-flight Iranian
military and security personages for personal penalties. Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary
Guards Corps, was additionally branded a criminal who should stand trial for murder.

The sanctions also encompassed Heydar Moslehi, Minister of Intelligence, Mostafa Mohammad Najjar, Interior Minister
in charge of Iranian security and intelligence services, and Gen. Hossein Taeb, Deputy IRGC commander and head of
the corps intelligence.

Obama only signed the sanctions order this week whereas the eight officials' crimes occurred more than a year ago
following their crackdown on the political opposition which accused the regime of falsifying the presidential elections.
The US president took this step with the clear intention of adding to the demoralization prevailing in high places in
Tehran over their failure to bring the destructive Staxnet worm under control. Details on its ravages and the infighting
at the top of the Islamic regime appear in separate articles below.

The Stuxnet Malworm's First Strike

An Assessment of Initial Cyber-Damage to Iran's Nuclear Program

Here first are two pertinent facts.

Fact One: While expert and Iranian sources consulted by DEBKA-Net-Weekly agreed that Iran's nuclear
program is partly paralyzed by the invasion of the powerfully malignant Stuxnet software, Western intelligence
organizations tracking the program disagree about the scale of the shutdown and its effect on Iran's progress
toward a weapon.

One faction, most of them US intelligence evaluators, points to the difficulty of separating out the damage caused
by the cyber attack from the two other causes of the current slowdown: Technical glitches which Iranian engineers
are unable to repair - is one; the absence of a center of authority in Tehran competent to give the directors of the
program and its various plants and installations the go-ahead for the next stage and earmark the necessary budgeting
 - is the other. According to this group, the slowdown from the latter cause is dramatic. It arises from a seesaw within
the revolutionary leadership over where to take the nuclear program next: all the way to a weapon - or not?

The situation within the program is so "chaotic," according to one US intelligence view, that "There is no chance that
in the next 12-18 months the Iranians will be technologically capable of building a nuclear bomb or warheads."

Stuxnet delays nuclear progress - but may not be the only culprit

If this evaluation holds up, then the Obama administration's judgment - that a decision on action must be taken within
a year because by then, Iran will be able to produce an operational weapon - goes by the board. This premise was at
the bottom of President Barack Obama's separate understandings with Saudi King Abdullah and Israeli Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu in recent weeks.

According to this view, the moment of decision has lost its urgency in terms of the need to impose more economic
and financial sanctions and, certainly, for military action.

Fact Two: Iran and its nuclear installations in particular have been under attack since July - not by rockets
or warplanes - or even covert special forces, but by a malworm called Stuxnet.

Is this worm to blame for the partial shutdowns, delays and chaos described as besetting Iran's nuclear program
and the reshuffling of Obama's timeline for it to mature into an operational weapon? The answer to that question
depends on whom you ask.

Three different groups of knowledgeable sources in Washington and Jerusalem:

1. The two are certainly connected.
This group finds it possible that the clandestine organization or organizations which launched the cyber offensive -
whichever they were - took note of the technical malfunctions dogging Iran's nuclear program and used Stuxnet as
a hitch-hiker to make them worse. But even they were surprised when the malworm turned out to be powerful and
harmful enough to open up new diplomatic options for President Obama.

If the US, then the cyber attack saved it from military action

This group is sure it is no accident that the peaking of Stuxnet ravages in Iran coincided with the staging Tuesday,
Sept. 28, of the first United States three-to-four day exercise on responses to a hostile cyber-blitz. The Department
of Homeland Security's Cyber Storm III has deployed thousands of cyber-security personnel from government and
industry to drill their responses to attacks on vital services such as power, water and banks. Tehran would not have
missed this "coincidence."

2. The two are not connected.
According to this theory, the intelligence organizations responsible for the cyber attack on Iran used the paralytic
mess in the nuclear program to leak word of a full Stuxnet virus attack in order to panic Iran's leaders into reaching
the "right" decision about their nuclear drive, i.e. to stop short of building a nuclear device and stand still at the
critical threshold - or else face a full-blown cyber attack by this deadly malworm.
In other words, the cyber attack on Iran is a lot milder than publicly depicted.

Military sources confirm that only three countries ? the US, Germany and Israel - have the technology and skills
for conducting a cyber attack on this order. Since Berlin would not consider such a strike on Tehran, it stands to
reason that it must have come from the US and Israel, possibly without either clueing in the other.

One view claims that Washington resorted to Stuxnet to buy time for avoiding military action against Iran and
succeeded beyond all its expectations.

If Israel, a single malworm shot down Iran's regional pretensions

According to an alternative hypothesis, Israel used its high-tech military cyber intelligence unit to stage the attack.
Tired of being strong-armed by the Obama administration into holding back on a military strike against Iran, Jerusalem
accepted a military intelligence recommendation to substitute a cyber offensive for military action, a course Washington
has never vetoed.

Israeli planners figured that paralyzing Iran's nuclear program, defusing its military prowess and disabling Revolutionary
Guards resources with a single electronic worm, would finally burst the balloon of Iran's pretensions as a mighty regional
power. Its innate vulnerabilities would be paraded, making even its Arab neighbors and allies, Syria, Hizballah and Hamas,
sit up and note their iconic champion's downfall.

Without confirming whether or not Jerusalem was behind the attack and, if so, if it had the nod from Washington,
a senior US intelligence source talking to sources recalled how in September 2007 Israel demolished the plutonium
reactor North Korea was building as a project to be shared with Iran. To disarm Syria's Russian-made missiles guarding
the reactor, Israel activated the radar's built-in kill switch. In Iran, too, the source theorized, someone must have planted
a similar built-in kill switch in the control systems of its nuclear development infrastructure.

In so doing, Israel found a surprising way out of the controversy over a military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities -
at least for the time being. According to this argument, Israel most likely orchestrated the Stuxnet attack and did
so successfully. All that sources can say for certain this week is that whoever was behind the first act of cyber war
against physical institutions of a state never imagined its success would be so dramatic. A partial catalogue of its
results appears in the next article.

Iran Nonplussed

Malworm Stuxnet Proved More Destructive than a Conventional Attack

Nuclear enrichment site in NatanzWith the impact of the first cyber offensive ever inflicted on a state just
beginning to register, the magnitude of the damage Iran has already suffered may be hard to grasp.
The attack which crested in the last couple of weeks has wrought strategic ravages on a scale comparable
to an attack by conventional weapons. The big difference, as military sources point out, is that Stuxnet has
not demolished buildings, military bases or physical utilities - or caused massive loss of life. No more than a
dozen individuals were killed. They were sitting in front of computers which imploded in military laboratories
and installations and civilian utilities or were trapped in fires which flared at big strategic installations when
Stuxnet shut down their systems and networks.

A conventional war on a comparable scale would have caused massive devastation. Strategic and military
infrastructure would have been pulverized and casualty figures soared to at least one thousand dead and
5,000 injured. Most media and Iranian outlets have built their reporting on the new cyber war around
descriptions of how Stuxnet works and guesswork about its source - or sources.

Undisclosed so far are eight pieces of essential data which are exclusively listed hereunder:

Attack focused on nuclear and military targets - less on civilian infrastructure

1. The attack has focused on Iran's nuclear and military resources - less on civilian infrastructure.
The concealed projects of Iran's nuclear weapons program have, in particular, been either partially damaged
and would meet the conventional military definition of "temporarily out of action," or so immobilized as to require
many months, perhaps more than a year, before they are restored to even partial operation.

2. Most of Iran's key military facilities, including the nuclear laboratories in North Tehran, the atomic
reactor in Bushehr, the uranium enrichment plants in Natanz and the thousands of centrifuges spinning there,
are gravely disabled and working at minimal capacity.

3. Some of Iran's military command and control centers at military and Revolutionary Guards Corps
headquarters are shut down, along with field command centers for ballistic missile batteries, key airbases,
air defenses and navy. Alien computer software was found loaded in their networks instead of normal operating systems.
A high-ranking Persian Gulf official remarked that an enemy attack in the last two weeks would have found Iran virtually
stripped of its defenses. A missile strike combined with a commando landing on Iran's strategic sites would have met with
slight resistance. Neither the General Staff nor the IRGC Command was in any state to muster the forces needed to repel
an invasion for more than a few hours. Tehran today, said the source, is a city without protection against an air strike
or a ground offensive.

4. The most serious impairment has been suffered by the military industrial giants, which are relied on in
emergencies to keep up a rapid supply of munitions and replacement parts to the military and Revolutionary Guards
(IRGC) units, intelligence sources report. Hundreds of these plants are near breakdown.

Not thousands but millions of computers affected

The intelligence assessment is that the computers and operating systems of Iran's military industrial complex were
especially vulnerable to viral invasion because their Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are
controlled by the imported Siemens management software called Simatic WinCC, which is used around the world by
armed forces, oilfields, power stations, large communications systems, airports and ships.

5. Intelligence sources familiar with IRGC operations report severe damage to the command centers and training
facilities the Al Qods Brigades runs for foreign terrorists, as part of its external clandestine and terror-sponsoring mission.
Its facilities are forced to operate now at sub-optimal capacity.

6. Iran's key power grid, pumping and water supply stations, the computers controlling public transport, including
railways, and the haulage companies serving major Iranian cities, have been marginally affected. The hold-ups in public
transport and the delivery of fuel and food to the populace are much milder than the shutdowns overtaking national
strategic and military systems. These minor hitches appear designed to give Tehran a broad idea of the wholesale
paralysis awaiting Iran if the operators of Stuxnet take their attack to a higher level.

7. At the end of last week, the Iranians reported 30,000 of their computers had been affected. Monday,
September 27, some Iranian sources were talking about 45,000, including 30,000 in the Bushehr nuclear reactor
and military facilities alone. (Administratively, the Natanz uranium enrichment facility is located in the same
province as Bushehr)

According to sources, Tehran issued these low figures to downplay the scale of the damage for the benefit of the public.
In reality, Western intelligence calculates that millions of computer systems and personal computers were struck.
Our sources say that a Stuxnet invasion of just one sector, such as the military industry or banks, could disable
three million computers in less than half an hour.

Stuxnet's massive theft of computerized Iran intelligence secrets

8. Iran has taken a huge intelligence setback from this digital invasion aside from the physical damage.
Intelligence sources report that no one aside from its programmers can tell how much intelligence data the Staxnet
raiders extracted from Iran's military, intelligence and industrial computer systems before they were discovered.
All the Iranians know at present is that the malworm, which was kept latent inside their most sensitive computers
for months before it was activated, was not idle.

It captured every scrap of data the targeted systems processed, received or loaded onto other local or outside
computers and transferred it directly to an unidentified operating center abroad.

Tehran's nuclear, military, financial and intelligence systems were stripped of their secrets and laid bare to
alien eyes to a degree unparalleled in any world conflict. Yet Iran has no notion of who the cyber raiders
are or exactly what secrets they have purloined. The only way they could assess the damage was to determine
the approximate date of the Stuxnet invasion and assume that all the information processed from that date on
had been stolen. And that is exactly what Iranian intelligence experts have done.

They fixed January 1, 2010 as the malworm's first day of operation inside their systems and are treating the
entire body of technological, intelligence and personal information which passed through Iranian servers and
personal computers from that day on as compromised material.

Does anyone have the code for undoing the malworm?

On Monday, September 27, Hamid Alipour, deputy head of Iran's government-owned Information Technology Company,
who has been assigned to lead the counter-attack on the cyber assailant, warned that the Stuxnet worm is "mutating
and wreaking further havoc on computerized industrial equipment." He said, "The attack is still ongoing and new versions
of this virus are spreading."

According to this Iranian computer expert, the hackers, who enjoyed "huge investments" from a series of foreign countries
or organizations, designed the worm to exploit five different security vulnerabilities." It is not a "normal" worm, he stressed.
His words indicated that Tehran is completely at sea over the crisis, with no notion when the cyber attack will end or who
is behind it. The next day, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi tried to correct the impression
of panic. But he was forced to admit that the country's first nuclear reactor, inaugurated with much fanfare in August, faced
a delay of at least two or three months before it supplied energy. He denied that the reactor had been hit by the marauding
virus.

Wednesday, Sept. 29, sources disclosed that Iran had secretly approached computer security experts in West and East
Europe, offering them substantial payment for advice on how to get rid of the worm.

Those experts turned cagey when Tehran refused to tell them exactly which plants, strategic centers and control systems
were under attack, allow them access to personally inspect Stuxnet's targets or describe the changes made in imported
control systems. These experts described the Iranian officials they spoke to as sounding desperate. Iranian computer
security experts had found their efforts to purge the cyber raider made Stuxnet more aggressive than before and triggered
a second round of attacks.

Military sources say that the Iranians are not the only ones stumped for solutions to the first cyber offensive in the history
of war. World intelligence chiefs would dearly like to know whether the inventors of Stuxnet who planted it in Iran are still
in control of the destructive malworm.

Discord at the Top Delays Iranian Action against Cyber Worm

Ayatollah Khamenei Turns His Back on Ahmadinejad

Ever since 2007, whenever Israel raised the need for military action to wipe out Iran's nuclear bomb drive, Washington
argued that the ensuring war emergency would only unite the Iranian people behind its rulers and their policies. The supreme
spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would profit by perpetuating their radical grip on
the regime.

This week, under the biggest cyber attack in the history of world conflicts, Iran swept this theory away. Even in the
big cities where some key systems and personal computers were disrupted by the invasive virus, there were no popular
rallies behind the government. In any case, the leadership itself was split down the middle by a division at the top.

Ordinary Iranians were a bit surprised by the unusual openness allowed the media in reporting the details of the attack -
but remained passive. They were not even roused from their apathy by the official IRNA news agency's revelation Monday,
Sept. 27, that "personal computers are also being targeted by the malware. Although the main objective of the Stuxnet virus
is to destroy industrial systems, its threat to home computer users is serious."

People just shrugged and waited to see what the government would do about it. They showed no sign of sympathy for
the troubled regime or worry about the setback to Iran's nuclear program - certainly not for the Revolutionary Guards'
struggle against the computer worm. Just the opposite; they sat back and watched to see if the regime cracked.
Iranian citizens were not the only ones waiting and watching.

Popular confidence in organs of state ebbing

A large slab of the population with a direct vested interest in the regime beating the malworm is reported by Iranian
sources to be getting increasingly nervous.

Hundreds of thousands of officers and rank and file of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and possibly millions of basij militiamen,
who are charged with maintaining public order in the cities, have been brainwashed for many years into trusting that Iran is
the top boss of the region, a world-class military power which is more than a match not only for little Israel but for mighty
America.

Among these guardians of the regime, who are also its dependants, the suspicion is suddenly growing that the giant has a
weak center. They see their infallible political and military leaders falling down against the challenge of a malignant computer
worm consuming their advanced systems of governance and war.

Now they are not sure whom or what to believe.

The IRGC's deputy commander Gen. Hossein Salami was sent Monday with soothing words to reassure them. He announced
that the Corps and the armed forces had produced protective devices applicable to all points of the country. Iran possesses
"all the defensive structures it needs to fight a long-term war against the biggest and most powerful enemies" and "more
advanced weapons and equipment than in the past," he said.

What weapons systems was Gen. Salami talking about? his once blindly obedient subordinates wondered.
Why the sudden
talk about "fighting a long-term war?"

His words did nothing to allay the uncertainty spreading through this bastion of the regime any more than the streets of Iran.
Because the regime doesn't have a clue how to deal with the cyber attack, no one can tell what tomorrow will bring.
Recruited two days later was the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, Ali Akbar Salehi. He met with the same
skepticism as the IRGC commander when he said "The virus has not reached the main system?We have started protective
measures for computers since last year and we intensified them two months ago to prevent any virus." Denying the Bushehr
reactor had been damaged, he added: "I say firmly that enemies have failed so far to damage our nuclear systems through
computer worms despite all their measures and we have cleaned our systems."

The trouble is that Salehi was forced to admit to a delay of several months in activating the Bushehr reactor.
Moreover, a day earlier, on Tuesday, Sept. 28, another Iranian official, Hamid Alipour, deputy head of Iran's
government-owned Information Technology Company, warned that the Stuxnet worm is "mutating and wreaking
further havoc on computerized industrial equipment" and "new versions of the virus are spreading."

A greater peril to the regime than the 2009 opposition uprising

The truth is that Iran's rulers, aware for almost two weeks of Stuxnet's depredations, recognize that their
regime's stability will be in dire peril as soon as the people, the troops and the intelligentsia catch
on to their helplessness in overcoming the rampaging worm. Their peril could be more acute than that posed
by the Green opposition movement which challenged the presidential election results in July 2009.

Yet the men who rule Iran have been unable to pull themselves together and get to grips with the hazard
because they are busy sparring with each other. As they maneuver for the high ground, Iranian sources report,
Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmedinejad are wary of committing themselves to steps that might give the other the
upper hand.

The falling-out started in recent weeks when spiritual leader decided to turn his back on his prot?g? the president
and his close circle and revive his old ties with Ahmadinejad's arch-rival, ex-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani,
a veteran powerhouse of Iranian politics who lent his support to the Green opposition's uprising last year.

This rapprochement was unfolding when Ahmadinejad stood before the UN Assembly on Sept. 23 and accused
America of being behind the 9/11 terrorist atrocity.

That speech was over the top even for the fire-eating Iranian president. Our Iranian sources report that he fired
two barrels - both to settle scores over the Stuxnet attack and as a battle cry against Khamenei's alliance with
a foe judged a relative pragmatist in terms of revolutionary Iran.

The first outward manifestation of this alliance occurred on Sept. 21 when Rafsanjani met with the families of
political prisoners, many of them jailed to silence the opposition to Ahmadinejad. According to Rafsanjani's website,
the meeting in his office lasted about three hours. The former president listened to every one of his visitors and
asked them to be patient.

"Liberty and justice are among the most important goals of the Islamic Republic and some shortcomings will certainly
not prevent [us] from reaching these noble goals," he said. He then explained that taking their demands to "agents"
(a reference to officials, many of them accused of abusing political prisoners) would not guarantee a positive response,
but he promised to address them to the Leader and hoped "it will not be fruitless."

This promise and other signs were quickly translated by political observers in Tehran as meaning that Khamanei had
opened his door to Rafsanjani and embarked on an epic shift away from Ahmadinejad's clenched fist toward an o
utreach to Iran's more liberal circles using his new ally as a bridge.

Iranian hardliners alarmed, Saudis amused

This shift alarms the extremist clerical factions and hardline IRGC commanders which make up the president's following -
all of them ardent advocates of Iran's acquisition of an arsenal of nuclear weapons and warheads. They see their great
dream going up in smoke if the spiritual leader is swayed by Rafsanjani and his long-held proposition that Iran should
set the stage for a nuclear capability by putting in place the technology and tools for assembling a weapon - and then
step back before crossing the line into building one.

This position would bring Iran a lot closer than it is today to the policy espoused by President Barack Obama.
It is hard to imagine Ahmadinejad letting it all go without a fight. Finding its Iranian neighbor doubly beleaguered
by an unstoppable cyber attack on their computer and control systems, on the one hand, and a domestic quarrel,
on the other, the rulers of Saudi Arabia were not above rubbing their hands in delight.

Tariq Alhomayed, editor-in-chief of the most important Saudi newspaper A-Sharq al-Awsat, the royal family's chief
mouthpiece wrote in its latest issue: "Despite all Iran's propaganda promoting the idea that it is the 'superpower'
of the Middle East, a power capable of confronting America, according to the Iranian President, Tehran today is
at the mercy of the 'Stuxnet' electronic virus. "Today, it is highly significant that a virus, resembling a 'worm,'
has managed to destabilize Iran. This has occurred despite all the Iranian statements, such as the infamous
'missile' propaganda, and other images of misinformation which have been broadcast by Tehran every day."
No one who counts in Damascus, Ankara, Beirut or Gaza will have missed this comment knowing it comes
from the horse's mouth in Riyadh. The planners of the Stuxnet assault on Iran will also have drawn their
own conclusions.

[Christians4LessGvt]

Russian experts flee Iran, escape dragnet
for cyber worm smugglers

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report

October 3, 2010, 1:13 PM (GMT+02:00)


Iranian nuclear czar with Russian experts in happier days

debkafile's intelligence sources report from Iran that dozens of Russian nuclear engineers, technicians
and contractors are hurriedly departing Iran for home since local intelligence authorities began rounding
up their compatriots as suspects of planting the Stuxnet malworm into their nuclear program.

Among them are the Russian personnel who built Iran's first nuclear reactor at Bushehr which Tehran
admits has been damaged by the virus.

One of the Russian nuclear staffers, questioned in Moscow Sunday, Oct. 3 by Western sources, confirmed
that many of his Russian colleagues had decided to leave with their families after team members were
detained for questioning at the beginning of last week. He refused to give his name because he and his
colleagues intend to return to Iran if the trouble blows over and the detainees are quickly released after
questioning.

According to our sources, these detentions were the source of the announcement Saturday, Oct. 2, by
Iranian Intelligence Minister Heidar Moslehi that several "nuclear spies" had been captured. "The enemy
had sent electronic worms through the internet to undermine Iran's nuclear activities," he said. This was
the first high-level Iranian admission that the Stuxnet virus had been planted by foreign elements to
sabotage their entire nuclear program - and not just the Bushehr reactor. The comprehensive scale of the
damage is attested to by the detention of Russian nuclear experts also at Natanz, Isfahan and Tehran.
Moslehi added: "We are always facing destructive activities by these espionage services and of course
we have arrested a number of nuclear spies to block the enemy's destructive moves.

This statement is expected to prompt a second wave of Russian nuclear specialists to flee Iran.

The prime aim of their interrogation is to find out if Russian intelligence knowingly planted the destructive
worm in Iran's nuclear facilities, possibly for under-the-counter pay, or were the unwitting carriers of
equipment on order by Iran that had been previously infected.

debkafile's Western sources report that the hundreds of Russian scientists, engineers and technicians
employed in Iran were responsible for installing the Siemens control systems in Iran's nuclear complex
and other facilities which proved most vulnerable to the cyber attack.

They were the only foreigners with access to these heavily guarded plants. At Bushehr, for instance,
the Russian personnel enjoyed full access to all its systems.   

[Plane]

Wow Iranian bomb plans were so well made.

Distribteing plants widely , hollowing out mountains and digging in deep enough to survive bombing, but....

Useing lots of foreighn contractors so that the rot could be planted easily on the center of the heart.


The gang that couldn't shoot straight?

[Plane]

I suppose that the Iranians could remove all computers attached to critical equipment and replace them with brand new computers.

But would this solve the problem ?

Who is availible and trustworthy to install the specialised software? Not the same crew that failed to keep their present set of computers clear.

Can they remove the software that they need from an infected computer?

Unless they can discover how the worm was installed in the first place , I don't think that they can have any confidence in the solutions that they come up with .

This couldn't happen to a nicer police state, but while we laugh we ought to think about how vunerable we are here.