Israel, US Collaborated In CREATION Of ‘Flame’ Virus (FOX News)

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Flame Steals Data Even When Computers Are Not Connected To The Internet

Flame Virus Developed By U.S. Government

Kaspersky At Cyber Security Conference: ‘It’s Not Cyber War, It’s Cyber Terrorism And I’m Afraid It’s Just The Beginning Of The Game … I’m Afraid It Will Be The End Of The World As We Know It’

Kaspersky Lab: Flame And Stuxnet Virus Share Common Origin

Obama Ordered The Stuxnet Attack On Iran’s Nuclear Facilities – And Yes: This Is An Act Of War!

President Obama Ordered Stuxnet Attacks On Iran Nuclear Facilities

US And Israel Created Stuxnet, Lost Control Of It

Flame Super-Virus Threatening To Cripple Entire Nations Has ‘Hallmarks Of The NSA’


??Israel, US collaborated in creation of ‘Flame’ virus to slow Iran’s nuke efforts, report says (FOX News, June 19, 2012):

Israel and the United States collaborated in the development of the powerful computer virus dubbed the “Flame,” which briefly affected Iran’s key oil industry, an official with knowledge of the effort said.

The Washington Post reports that the massive piece of malware, which collected critical intelligence information from Iran, was created with the aim of slowing the country’s suspected nuclear weapon development.

The Worm.Win32.Flame threat, or “Flame” for short, was likely built by the same nation-state responsible for the Stuxnet virus that targeted Iran’s nuclear power plant in 2010. Many suspect Stuxnet was the work of Israeli intelligence.

Read moreIsrael, US Collaborated In CREATION Of ‘Flame’ Virus (FOX News)

Flame Steals Data Even When Computers Are Not Connected To The Internet

Flame Steals Data Even When Computers Are Not Connected to the Internet (Occupy Corporatism, June 13, 2012):

Experts specializing in malware from Bitdefender have uncovered a special capability in Flame’s code that allows the virus to steal data from computers that are not connected to the internet or networked machines.

Flame can move stolen data to a USB memory stick plugged into an infected harddrive. Bitdefender assert that this ability has never been witnessed before. This cyberespionage virus will move stolen information to an USB outlet, then seemingly wait for the chance to upload it to the malware controllers once the infected computer links to the internet.

Read moreFlame Steals Data Even When Computers Are Not Connected To The Internet

Microsoft Update and The Nightmare Scenario

Microsoft Update and The Nightmare Scenario (F-Secure, May 4, 2012):

About 900 million Windows computers get their updates from Microsoft Update. In addition to the DNS root servers, this update system has always been considered one of the weak points of the net. Antivirus people have nightmares about a variant of malware spoofing the update mechanism and replicating via it.

Turns out, it looks like this has now been done. And not by just any malware, but by Flame.

The full mechanism isn’t yet completely analyzed, but Flame has a module which appears to attempt to do a man-in-the-middle attack on the Microsoft Update or Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) system. If successful, the attack drops a file called WUSETUPV.EXE to the target computer.

This file is signed by Microsoft with a certificate that is chained up to Microsoft root.

Except it isn’t signed really by Microsoft.

Read moreMicrosoft Update and The Nightmare Scenario

Obama Ordered The Stuxnet Attack On Iran’s Nuclear Facilities – And Yes: This Is An Act Of War!

See also:

US To Classify Major Cyber-Attacks As Acts Of War


Obama Ordered The “Code Stux” (ZeroHedge, May 31, 2012):

When Iran’s nuclear facilities were publicly crippled in 2011 by what then was considered a revolutionary computer virus which destroys physical equipment, many immediately assumed the virus originated in Israel for obvious reasons. They were wrong. In what can be described as the first presidentially-mandated and condoned act of cyberwarfare, one circumventing the War Powers Act of course, the NYT informs us that the order to physically impair Iranian sovereignty came from none other than the Nobel Peace prize winning president: Barack Obama.

From the NYT:

From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks – begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games – even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.

Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium.

This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts. None would allow their names to be used because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day.

For those confused – yes: this is an act of war. A New Normal war.

It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives. The code itself is 50 times as big as the typical computer worm, Carey Nachenberg, a vice president of Symantec, one of the many groups that have dissected the code, said at a symposium at Stanford University in April. Those forensic investigations into the inner workings of the code, while picking apart how it worked, came to no conclusions about who was responsible.

And still America continues to wage war, subverting the constitution, without any Congressional approval, and without even telling the population what is really happening. Because it is “for its own good.

A similar process is now under way to figure out the origins of another cyberweapon called Flame that was recently discovered to have attacked the computers of Iranian officials, sweeping up information from those machines. But the computer code appears to be at least five years old, and American officials say that it was not part of Olympic Games. They have declined to say whether the United States was responsible for the Flame attack.

The “New Normal Gulf of Tonkin“:

Read moreObama Ordered The Stuxnet Attack On Iran’s Nuclear Facilities – And Yes: This Is An Act Of War!

President Obama Ordered Stuxnet Attacks On Iran Nuclear Facilities

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US To Classify Major Cyber-Attacks As Acts Of War:

The Wall Street Journal, citing three officials who said they had seen the document, reported Tuesday that the strategy would classify major cyber-attacks as acts of war, paving the way for possible military retaliation.

The newspaper said that the strategy was intended in part as a warning to foes that may try to sabotage the US electricity grid, subways or pipelines.

“If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks,” it quoted a military official as saying.


Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran (New York Times, May 1, 2012):

WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

Read morePresident Obama Ordered Stuxnet Attacks On Iran Nuclear Facilities

US And Israel Created Stuxnet, Lost Control Of It

Confirmed: US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it (Ars Technica, June 1, 2012):

In 2011, the US government rolled out its “International Strategy for Cyberspace,” which reminded us that “interconnected networks link nations more closely, so an attack on one nation’s networks may have impact far beyond its borders.” An in-depth report today from the New York Times confirms the truth of that statement as it finally lays bare the history and development of the Stuxnet virus—and how it accidentally escaped from the Iranian nuclear facility that was its target.

The article is adapted from journalist David Sanger’s forthcoming book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, and it confirms that both the US and Israeli governments developed and deployed Stuxnet. The goal of the worm was to break Iranian nuclear centrifuge equipment by issuing specific commands to the industrial control hardware responsible for their spin rate. By doing so, both governments hoped to set back the Iranian research program—and the US hoped to keep Israel from launching a pre-emptive military attack.

Read moreUS And Israel Created Stuxnet, Lost Control Of It

Iran Claims To Have Beaten ‘Flame’ Computer Virus

Related info:

Flame Super-Virus Threatening To Cripple Entire Nations Has ‘Hallmarks Of The NSA’


Iran claims to have beaten ‘Flame’ computer virus (Telegraph, May 30, 2012):

Iran claims it has defeated a powerful computer virus that has boasted unprecedented data-snatching capabilities and could eavesdrop on computer users, a senior official said.

Ali Hakim Javadi, Iran’s deputy Minister of Communications and Information Technology, told the official IRNA news agency that Iranian experts have already produced an antivirus capable of identifying and removing “Flame” from computers.

Read moreIran Claims To Have Beaten ‘Flame’ Computer Virus

Flame Super-Virus Threatening To Cripple Entire Nations Has ‘Hallmarks Of The NSA’

Was Flame super-virus created in the US? Cyber weapon threatening to cripple entire nations has ‘hallmarks of the NSA’ (Daily Mail, May 31, 2012):

  • Cyber experts: Spyware too sophisticated to have come from anywhere else

The Flame computer virus which is threatening to bring countries to a standstill is too sophisticated to have been created anywhere other than the U.S., it was claimed today.

As the United Nations prepares to issue its ‘most serious warning’ to guard against the superbug, cyber experts said it carried all the markings of a U.S. espionage operation.

Specifically, they have pointed the finger at the highly secretive National Security Agency.

Read moreFlame Super-Virus Threatening To Cripple Entire Nations Has ‘Hallmarks Of The NSA’

Computer Virus Infects US Drone Fleet

Exclusive: Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet (Wired, Oct. 7, 2011):

A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.

The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.

“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

Read moreComputer Virus Infects US Drone Fleet