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Stuxnet Source Code

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Re: Stuxnet Source Code

#61
post #47

I just love that not only they copyrighted it, they even give excuses for it. You can't copyright someone else's work, regardless of how long you took to reverse-engineer it from disassembled binaries. Obviously the "rights owners" are not going to take those two guys to court (pity though, that would've been hilarious), but since the only reason those two could license this is that this is a computer virus and no on…

They DO have copyright on the reverse engineering work. But that doesn't mean that they don't have full copyright over the code which looking at the LICENSE file alone it looks they are claiming. There should at least be a copyright line mentioning the original authors, even if just "Unknown Authors". They also obviously don't have permission to redistribute their derivative or to create it in the first place.

Its also ironic that they expect others to follow their license when they are fine with ignoring the copyright of the original hackers.

Ultimately though, copyright as we have it today is extremely silly and all they are asking for is attribution which IMO should be the default.

Re: Stuxnet Source Code

#63

I remember first hearing about this while working at a US firewall company. The scale and precision of the attack kept this virus in the minds of everyone who appreciated what it proved capable of and the scale of social engineering employed to effect it. It kind of ushered in state-on-state cyber warfare, or at least, brought the reality of weaponized viruses to the public conscience.

Imagine if the same strategy were applied to biological warfare. Novel viruses tailored to be symptomatic and cause harm to just one specific world leader. If the technology exists, it could be the most formidable assassination tool available; a self-delivering, non-nuclear ace-in-the-hole for winning a war.

It's probably not that imaginary. There was much hand ringing during COVID that Russia's testing protocol for meeting Putin would allow them to collect DNA from world leaders.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-kept-macron-dista...

Re: Stuxnet Source Code

#64
post #58

I remember reading a very well written article on stuxnet, detailing the entire way it worked. It was written in a very story-like way that built slowly until it revealed what the actual payload and impact was. Does anyone have a link to this article?

I also remember reading something like that. Sorry that I can't help locate it.

Edit: Maybe it isn't what I wanted, but this article was good.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/how-digital-dete...

Re: Stuxnet Source Code

#65

I remember first hearing about this while working at a US firewall company. The scale and precision of the attack kept this virus in the minds of everyone who appreciated what it proved capable of and the scale of social engineering employed to effect it. It kind of ushered in state-on-state cyber warfare, or at least, brought the reality of weaponized viruses to the public conscience.

Imagine if the same strategy were applied to biological warfare. Novel viruses tailored to be symptomatic and cause harm to just one specific world leader. If the technology exists, it could be the most formidable assassination tool available; a self-delivering, non-nuclear ace-in-the-hole for winning a war.

This concept is featured in The Dark Forest, the second book in the Three Body Problem trilogy. It was something where you could genetically tag someone and then if they woke up 50 years later from a chrono sleep, various systems were preprogrammed to have "accidents" around them, like self driving cars, etc.

Re: Stuxnet Source Code

#67
post #58

I remember reading a very well written article on stuxnet, detailing the entire way it worked. It was written in a very story-like way that built slowly until it revealed what the actual payload and impact was. Does anyone have a link to this article?

The Perfect Weapon by David Sanger.

Re: Stuxnet Source Code

#68

What always impressed me about Stuxnet wasn't the technical complexity, but the amount of spycraft that must have gone into identifying exactly what to program it to do, and what they could get away with.

France has enabled nuclear weapons programmes of many rouge states.

Maybe Israelis just went to the Elysee palace, and asked?

Re: Stuxnet Source Code

#69
>This repository contains RCEd code extracted from Stuxnet binaries via disassembler and decompilers.

Is there a way to write code (make binaries) such that it would be extremely difficult to recover the source code via decompilers or a disassembler?

Re: Stuxnet Source Code

#70
post #32

I remember having to write a presentation about Stuxnet while at Uni, it was insane. At the time they reckoned the authors had a functioning QA environment to ensure it actually worked (broke) the Siemens PLCs they were targeting.

Stuxnet didn't break anything. It was used to override the working regime of centrifuges and conceal this fact from being discovered.
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