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The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

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Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#221

Post by jgtrosh »

ttul wrote: post #200
vbsteven wrote: post #39

The scary thing about this is: Stuxnet is one of the "most sophisticated" pieces of malware we have discovered up until now . Who knows what kinds of software are still out there quietly doing their thing in the shadows.

Not scared of what “we” are doing to “them”, but rather what “they” are doing to “us”... our power plants, dams, electrical grids, gas pipelines, traffic light networks, air traffic control systems.........

The above comment makes no mentions of who is doing what to whom. I think the idea of “us” doing things worse than I could imagine is just as scary as the other way round. You are indirectly part of the responsible bodies and may face the backlash without having been able to not only do but even know anything about it. Imagine for exemple being a Russian citizen whose quality of life is diminished due to political/economic sanctions as a result of your country's espionage activity being revealed.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#222

Post by slowburning »

erkkie wrote: post #185
titzer wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, makes sense. It could also be that the HSM was shipped from one office to another after keys had been loaded onto it. Dunno.

In "secure" places, HSM's are basically in a vault with armed guards.

I have seen HSMs in a concrete fireproof room, inside another concrete room, inside a regular room, inside a nondescript building. This one required the use of 3 persons (one to authorize entry past the 2 guys with rifles, one to unlock the vault rack with the hsm, another to authenticate to the HSM to perform work).

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#223

Post by autokad »

"Realtek, which means that the authors of the worm were somehow able to break into the most secure location in a huge Taiwanese company"

err, no. The companies gave the US access. as for all the 'unknown windows vulnerabilities' it exploited, I wouldn't be 100% surprised if Microsoft left the vulnerabilities for what ever security agency that made it.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#224

Post by jerf »

Harvey-Specter wrote: post #68
nathanm412 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're quickly heading toward the age of the first Virtual WMD. The implications can be as wide as your imagination, but possibly worse than existing WMDs.

I'm having a hard time imagining a virtual WMD that is worse than the instant obliteration of millions of people.

In 20 years, a virtual WMD may well instantly obliterate millions of people.

I'm already unsure of what the most possible damage someone could do with over-the-air automobile firmware updates is today, just to take one example. What would it be like if someone put out a virus that at 11:32:42am on March 3rd, 2036 causes every GM, Ford, and Tesla self-driving car to lock all the doors, floor the accelerator, and let the chips fall where they may?

Consider not just the immediate impact of the crashes, but the fact that you just completely obliterated emergency services (they couldn't hope to serve but a tiny fraction of the victims), choked every major road and most of the minor roads with wreckage, wrought a catastrophe so large that while I don't predict what the effects would be, we're talking something more defining for a generation that would handily compete with both World Wars combined for psychological effect, with the Great Depression tossed in for good measure... it would be astonishing.

I'm not even sure we couldn't get close to that in 2018, to be honest. What if by some horrors the Stuxnet authors were set the task of making this happen? How close could they get?

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#225

Post by vertexFarm »

ssijak wrote: post #54

And then people make a fuss about Russia "hacking" the election with some dumb Facebook ads which cost less than maxed out Ford Mustang. When on the other hand we have the state-sponsored military grade/purpose viruses used to attack other nations/regions (Flume attacked a large number of targets and countries) and nobody blinks an eye.

That kind of complacent pride is very dangerous. Do you think the facebook ads are the only route taken? And do you think that nobody else is going to refine and develop these methods? The whole world saw an opportunity last November.

What we just saw was a public alpha. There will be a beta and a final version of this system. The rewards are too great for every state-level actor to ignore and fail to develop election manipulation tools using any new technology they can get their hands on. Big data may have doomed democratic process in an irreversible way. The next couple of decades will be telling.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#226

Post by tonypace »

_2d30 wrote: post #203
m0skit0 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forbes, definitely an objective and impartial source about Russia.

Is there a reason to believe it's not? I'm not familiar with any particular Russian bias from Forbes.

Forbes doesn't have a Russian bias. It has a business model bias. In short, it milks its good name while paying a low per click rate.

This combination is very, very attractive to propaganda operations. People who see themselves as writers cannot make an actual living there, but writing for a publication their parents recognize feeds their ego.

This can work either overtly or more subtly. They can simply reward useful perspectives with clicks, or they can offer additional steady money work through other channels. Either way they have an entirely deniable useful idiot.

Forbes is particularly full of this.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#227

Post by superflyguy »

indescions_2018 wrote: post #113

Stuxnet changed history. Any "game of chicken" style equilibria is broken if the probability a nuclear actor's command and control drops below 100%. If there is even a 1% chance that when a Big Red Button is pushed the missiles fail to launch the game becomes unwinnable. Simulations of imperfect information in dynamic brinkmanship where both players are known to have advanced cyber capabilities results in a single dr…

That's all very well but theory and maths aren't too relevant when the man behind the button is an illiterate cretin.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#228

Post by Lionsion »

cobbzilla wrote: post #220
sodafountan wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more interesting and along the same lines of thought, Stuxnet was probably considered a failure in the eyes of its creators. The fact that we're discussing it, analyzing it, and patching its exploits is probably the exact opposite of what its creators wanted for it, even if at a point it did have the desired affects. But now, everyone's wiser, so the game just got more complex.

No, I'm sure whoever created it doesn't consider it a failure. Its mission was to destroy some expensive industrial centrifuges and set back Iran's nuclear program. And it destroyed some centrifuges precisely as it was designed to. At that point discovery is inevitable, but whatevs because "mission accomplished".

> It's mission was to destroy some expensive industrial centrifuges and set back Iran's nuclear program. And it destroyed some centrifuges precisely as it was designed to. At that point discovery is inevitable, but whatevs because "mission accomplished".

I think it might be considered a partial success, but mostly failure. It did successfully set back Iran's nuclear program and destroy some centrifuges, but it spread too widely so it was probably detected much more quickly than desired.

Also, if it had been discovered only at the nuclear fuel plant, Iran might have kept quiet about it out of embarrassment, allowing it to be deployed elsewhere. Instead it was picked up by a major AV vendor and dissected very publicly.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#229

Post by packet_nerd »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #81
some_account wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a state actor, it's not difficult to gather a couple of programmers from the "antivirus" and security field and build something that is hard to detect. It would be impressive if it was the work of a teenager but it's not.

You also somehow need access to the industrial grade target platform in some way shape or form which is not something a teenager has lying around in their room nor extensive knowledge about to this extent.

> not something a teenager has lying around

Ha, generally true probably, but in my case as a teen I got my hands of a bunch of old industrial PLCs and built all kinds of interesting things in my room. :-) Ladder logic is how I got started programing, I didn't even have my own computer back then.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#230

Post by projectileboy »

vertexFarm wrote: post #214
organicmultiloc wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not everyone on the world stage is a rational game theory nerd that links to papers like we want them to be. Also 60 years of treating every other country as a box in a threat model to be manipulated against other boxes has been a completely unmitigated disaster, so maybe we should stop that.

For all the evidence we have, MAD has worked. Still here. Still no WWIII. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was looking like we'd have another world war every twenty years or so for the rest of time. As best we can tell, nukes actually did end large-scale war. I would call that at least a partially mitigated disaster.

You're not wrong, but there were multiple incidents during the cold war where the US and Soviet Union came very, very, very close to a nuclear exchange, and it was only dumb luck (and sometimes the heroic actions of individuals who were in the right place at the right time) that saved us. We were lucky, and luck is not a plan.
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