Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 321 posts

Re: US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it

#71

Post by eli »

abrahamsen wrote: post #24
ars wrote: post #5

arstechnica is taking the NY Times article and extrapolating too much. Confirmed? No it's not. It was suspected before, and it still is. And lost control would imply they could not control what it did to the target, which is incorrect. It did escape to the wild, but that's not really loosing control when it was designed to do nothing harmful on non target machines. Better to read the original, and the discussion on i…

Unless David E. Sanger is a new Jayson Blair, I'd say the connection is confirmed, not just suspected. There are no weasel words in the article, meaning both the journalist, his editor, and NYT are putting their reputation at stake. This is as strong as a newspaper story gets.

The story is indeed confirmed, but the NYTimes write-up is definitely better. Ars does not add much and what they do add is speculation.

Re: US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it

#72

Post by wpietri »

46Bit wrote: post #57
nicholassmith wrote: post #55

You know what's most surprising about this? That the developers, knowing fine well it was for a single target and the damage it could do in the wild, didn't implement a kill switch. Quite frankly cowboy coding like that is why we'll end up with Skynet becoming self-aware.

How do you put a kill switch in? The entire point was for it to be on an offline system, and the traffic for it checking for Internet to in turn check for an order like that might have given the game away. It sounds like they had something to check it wasn't outside and someone just screwed up.

I think the obvious thing would be to look for Internet activity on the machine. E.g., recent files for popular sites in a browser cache directory. Or live network traffic for public netblocks.

Re: US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it

#73

Post by moron »

ascendant wrote: post #51

I'm going to take the contrarian view here. If Iran had gotten to the point of enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels and Israel had done a pre-emptive strike, that would have gotten messy real fast. More messy than this. Disabling their centrifuges in a way where presumably no one died doesn't sound so bad to me considering the alternative. Again, just the contrarian viewpoint.

Judging by what I've read, this is far from contrarian.

Re: US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it

#74

Post by berntb »

cynoclast wrote: post #62
ck2 wrote: post #28

It's a new cold war. Eventually Iran will write viruses in return to attack US power grid. All fun and games until Homeland Security Theater is given new powers to raid your home and shoot your dog if they think your computer is being used as part of a botnet.

No, we are the aggressors here and I remain highly skeptical that Iran is even trying to do develop nuclear weapons. All the news outlets that speak English are biased as hell on this. If you want real news instead of propaganda you have to watch RT or Al Jazeera. Both of which condemn the US and Israel. Not Iran.

Do these media also, like Iran and the Arab world, support Sudan and claim that HRW etc are conspiracies about the mass murder and mass rapes? (It would be easy to continue with examples like this.)

Edit: A karma 33 account. I've probably been trolled.

Re: US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it

#75

Post by dpark »

Morg wrote: post #26

HIV (just to be clear, I have no clue wether HIV was assisted by some military programmes, but I can safely say such "mistakes" have been made in the past by the same army, like when they used to test nukes for example) Luckily this time it's a simple pc virus we can easily disassemble and counter - I think cyber war's still miles better than the alternatives.

No, you can't "safely" say that. You've no evidence that the US military has ever been involved in creating a wide-scale biological pandemic. This is just conspiracy theory bunk.

I'm not sure how you can reasonably compare testing nuclear weapons to the supposed propagation of HIV, either. These two things have nothing in common.

Re: US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it

#76

Post by forza »

zxcvb wrote: post #21
forza wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It got discovered, I would call that loosing control.

You're wrong. You can still be in control of a botnet (for example) even if it gets discovered and you can't spell 'losing'.

And you don't understand the different meanings of control. Controlling as in "issuing commands" is different from controlling an event. As far as I know there were no actual commands being given to Stuxnet. It was made for private networks how could there be?

Re: US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it

#77

Post by dredmorbius »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #64
wissler wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The centrifuges could have been destroyed, and with loss of human life. The system itself was damaged. I wouldn't call this a "cold" war. It is a very real, very physical war(albeit precisely targeted, for now).

The same sort of stuff used to happen during the Cold War with the Soviets [1]. Cold War doesn't mean no loss of life or destruction, just that there aren't two armies going at it on the battlefield. 1. http://www.damninteresting.com/the-farewell-dossier/

The gas pipeline sabotage was just the example I was thinking of. Nice.

Re: US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it

#78

Post by jQueryIsAwesome »

slurgfest wrote: post #30
netcan wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some things are a question of right, some things are a question of need or interest. The US has enemies and it doesn't want them to have nuclear weapons.

Because it could ONLY be the US which doesn't want Iran to have nuclear weapons (or for that matter, all of the Middle East to be in a nuclear arms race). Right?

Because it could ONLY be Iran which doesn't want USA to have nuclear weapons...

Historically speaking, USA is more likely to drop an atomic bomb than Iran (or any other country for that matter)

Re: US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it

#79

Post by forza »

zxcvb wrote: post #22
jgrahamc wrote: post #12

It's amusing that they 'lost control' of it because a simple bit of code along the lines of "if www.google.com resolves then shutdown" would be effective at detecting whether it was on the Internet or not.

What if google.com isn't resolvable from the host? The quality of person on HN has gone down hill.

You might want to have a look at your own comment history...

Re: US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it

#80

Post by bilbo0s »

ascendant wrote: post #51

I'm going to take the contrarian view here. If Iran had gotten to the point of enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels and Israel had done a pre-emptive strike, that would have gotten messy real fast. More messy than this. Disabling their centrifuges in a way where presumably no one died doesn't sound so bad to me considering the alternative. Again, just the contrarian viewpoint.

What concerns me is the lack of evidence that all of their centrifuges were actually knocked. At the start of this they were enriching to 5%, now they are at 20%. That indicates to me that they have been progressing, not repairing knocked centrifuges. I realize it is still a LONG way from where they need to be for a workable weapon. I'm just wondering if stuxnet did nothing but a tiny bit of damage and a whole lot of 'show our hand'. A little like the whole drone debacle.
Post reply on HN