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Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet

sentinelone.com

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Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet

#21

Post by dataflow »

andai wrote: post #15
dataflow wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how it can be an LLM summary of that page given that it mentions many things that your link doesn't. Edit: Old link for those wondering, since it got changed: https://hackingpassion.com/fast16-pre-stuxnet-cyber-sabotage...

It appears to be a summary of both the official SentinelOne article, and this one: https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/24/fast16_sabotage_malwa...

No, these aren't all mentioned there either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47914748

Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet

#22

Post by tiagod »

trebligdivad wrote: post #5

Haha it's a fun finding though; The source control comment feels a little off; I'm sure there were SCCS (hmm or did cvs use similar?) still around at that time.

I believe that comment was specific to it being unusual in Windows software, suggesting the developers were also working in UNIX stuff (where usage SCCS/RCS was common).

Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet

#24

Post by tptacek »

codezero wrote: post #7

My favorite part of this was: That kind of notation, called SCCS/RCS, is the equivalent of finding a rotary phone in a modern office. Nobody uses it in 2005 Windows kernel code unless their programming background goes back decades, to government and military computing environments — The astrophysics lab I worked at in 2006 was still using svn and had a bunch of Fortran with references to systems from the 70s and 80s.…

Yeah, I used to be skeptical of the government provenance of things like Stuxnet (I am not any more, I'm fully sold, like everyone else), and notes like this were why. People used RCS well into the 2000s! RCS as a tool had virtues over SVN and CVS.

Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet

#25

Post by codezero »

tptacek wrote: post #24
codezero wrote: post #7

My favorite part of this was: That kind of notation, called SCCS/RCS, is the equivalent of finding a rotary phone in a modern office. Nobody uses it in 2005 Windows kernel code unless their programming background goes back decades, to government and military computing environments — The astrophysics lab I worked at in 2006 was still using svn and had a bunch of Fortran with references to systems from the 70s and 80s.…

Yeah, I used to be skeptical of the government provenance of things like Stuxnet (I am not any more, I'm fully sold, like everyone else), and notes like this were why. People used RCS well into the 2000s! RCS as a tool had virtues over SVN and CVS.

I do wonder if these breadcrumbs were also left intentionally. “Oh look, we are using old stuff, don’t be afraid!” Or for some other reason. It is a little surprising to pull off such a sophisticated attack and miss details you could find running ‘strings’ unless I’m missing something and this part was encrypted.

Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet

#27

Post by codezero »

slim wrote: post #13

sabotaging science must be the most morally corrupt thing you can do as a civilisation

None of the science being sabotaged was being published in peer reviewed journals was it? (besides the Portuguese hydrodynamic modeling stuff, but it could have been accidental or had other uses)

And yes, to be clear, I don’t consider it contributing to “science” if it’s not published, reviewed, and reproducible.

Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet

#28

Post by tptacek »

codezero wrote: post #25
tptacek wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I used to be skeptical of the government provenance of things like Stuxnet (I am not any more, I'm fully sold, like everyone else), and notes like this were why. People used RCS well into the 2000s! RCS as a tool had virtues over SVN and CVS.

I do wonder if these breadcrumbs were also left intentionally. “Oh look, we are using old stuff, don’t be afraid!” Or for some other reason. It is a little surprising to pull off such a sophisticated attack and miss details you could find running ‘strings’ unless I’m missing something and this part was encrypted.

I think that in the time period we're talking about, RCS wasn't really even all that old. Like, RCS is old, sure, but it was also in common use especially by Unix systems people; it's what you might have reached for by default to version your dotfiles, for instance.

Re: Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet

#30

Post by codezero »

_joel wrote: post #26
slim wrote: post #13

sabotaging science must be the most morally corrupt thing you can do as a civilisation

I wonder how many results got nerfed via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug before it was known about.

I’d be surprised if it were a lot. At that time (open to corrections) not a lot of scientific research was done on consumer intel platforms.

Obviously it was found by a mathematician, but I still suspect it wasn’t obvious in published research or that it ended up not causing significant enough deviations to cause research to revisit the calculations.

My team ran into some interesting but very small deviations when we moved our iterative solar wind model from 32 bit to 64 bit, but the changes weren’t significant enough to revisit or re-do prior research wholesale.

Like my team in the 2000s I suspect anyone who had data crunched by this bug also revisited it and either concluded it wasn’t significant enough or redid the work and it didn’t change the conclusions.

I am curious now if this bug was cited in any papers at the time to give a rough idea how aware or affected academics were.

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