Infinite Unknown

- Secret rules to let Obama order ‘pre-emptive’ cyber attacks (PressTV, Feb 4, 2013):

A secret legal review on the use of America’s growing arsenal of cyberweapons has concluded that President Obama has the broad power to order a pre-emptive strike if the United States detects credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad, according to officials involved in the review.

That decision is among several reached in recent months as the administration moves, in the next few weeks, to approve the nation’s first rules for how the military can defend, or retaliate, against a major cyberattack.

New policies will also govern how the intelligence agencies can carry out searches of faraway computer networks for signs of potential attacks on the United States and, if the president approves, attack adversaries by injecting them with destructive code – even if there is no declared war.

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Tags: Barack Obama, CIA, Cyber Attack, Cyber War, CYBERCOM, Global News, Government, John Brennan, Obama administration, Pentagon, Stuxnet, U.S.

- “The Worm Turns” As Chevron ‘Infected’ By Stuxnet Collateral Damage (ZeroHedge, Nov 10, 2012):

“I don’t think the US government even realized how far it had spread” is how the collateral damage from the Iran-attacking Stuxnet computer virus is described by Chevron. The sleep San-Ramon-based oil giant admitted this week that from 2010 on “we’re finding it in our systems and so are other companies… so now we have to deal with it.” It would seem that little consideration for just how viral this cyber warfare tactic has become and this news (reported by Russia Today) is the first time a US company has come clean about the accidental infection. Discovered in 2010, the Stuxnet worm was reported with all but certainty to be the creation of the United States, perhaps with the assistance of Israel, to set back Iran’s nuclear enrichment program as a preemptive measure against an eventual war. In a June 2012 article published by The New York Times, government agents with direct knowledge of Stuxnet claimed that first President George W. Bush, then Barack Obama, oversaw the deployment of the worm as part of a well-crafted cyberassault on Iran. On the record, the federal government maintains ignorance on the subject of Stuxnet, but perhaps Chevron sums up the impact of Stuxnet best (given the escalating Iranian enrichment program): “I think the downside of what they did is going to be far worse than what they actually accomplished.”

Via Russia Today:

America’s cyberwar is already seeing collateral damage, and it’s hitting the country’s own billion-dollar companies. Oil giants Chevron say the Stuxnet computer virus made by the US to target Iran infected their systems as well.

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Tags: Chevron, Computer, Global News, Stuxnet, Technology

- Feds Look to Fight Leaks With ‘Fog of Disinformation’ (Wired, July 3, 2012):

Pentagon-funded researchers have come up with a new plan for busting leakers: Spot them by how they search, and then entice the secret-spillers with decoy documents that will give them away.

Computer scientists call it it “Fog Computing” — a play on today’s cloud computing craze. And in a recent paper for Darpa, the Pentagon’s premiere research arm, researchers say they’ve built “a prototype for automatically generating and distributing believable misinformation … and then tracking access and attempted misuse of it. We call this ‘disinformation technology.’”

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Tags: Barack Obama, Drones, Global News, Government, Obama administration, Pentagon, Politics, Society, Stuxnet, Surveillance, Technology

- 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.

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Tags: Barack Obama, Bitdefender, Computer, Computer virus, Eugene Kaspersky, Flame, Global News, Government, Internet, Kaspersky Lab, Obama administration, Politics, Stuxnet, Technology, U.S.

Related info:

- Kaspersky Lab: Flame And Stuxnet Virus Share Common Origin

- 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’

- 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’

- Flame virus, most sophisticated malicious code ever seen, was developed by U.S. government (Natural News, June 12, 2012):

Anyone who has spent longer than a day on a computer knows how dangerous to your hard drive malware and other malicious code can be. Most of us have fallen victim to one or the other and have cursed the day the hacker who developed it was born.

Now, according to reports, some of the most sophisticated malicious code ever developed is a product of the United States government, leaving more than a few tech experts and analysts concerned that maybe now, Washington has become a bigger info-terrorist than some of the country’s worst enemies.

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Tags: Barack Obama, Cyber Attack, Cyber War, Flame, Global News, Government, Internet, Iran, Israel, Obama administration, Politics, Stuxnet, Technology, U.S.

Related info:

- Flame Virus Developed By U.S. Government

- 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’

- Nations must talk to halt “cyber terrorism”: Kaspersky (Reuters, June 6, 2012):

Eugene Kaspersky, whose lab discovered the Flame virus that has attacked computers in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, said on Wednesday only a global effort could stop a new era of “cyber terrorism”.

“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 told reporters at a cyber security conference in Tel Aviv.

“I’m scared, believe me,” he said.

News of the Flame virus surfaced last week. Researchers said technical evidence suggests it was built for the same nation or nations that commissioned the Stuxnet worm that attacked Iran’s nuclear programme in 2010.

In recent months U.S. officials have become more open about the work of the United States and Israel on Stuxnet, which targeted Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facility.

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Tags: Barack Obama, Cyber Attack, Cyber War, Eugene Kaspersky, Flame, Global News, Government, Internet, Iran, Israel, Obama administration, Politics, Stuxnet, Technology, U.S.

Related info:

- 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’

- 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’

Researchers digging through the code of the recently discovered Flame worm say they have come across a wealth of evidence that suggests Flame and the now-famous Stuxnet worm share a common origin.

Researchers from Kaspersky Lab say that a critical module that the Flame worm used to spread is identical to a module used by Stuxnet.a, an early variant of the Stuxnet worm that began circulating in 2009, more than a year before a later variant of the worm was discovered by antivirus researchers at the Belarussian firm VirusBlokAda. The claims are the most direct, to date, that link the Flame malware, which attacked Iranian oil facilities, with Stuxnet, which is believed to have targeted Iran’s uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz. If true, they suggest a widespread and multi-year campaign of offensive cyber attacks against multiple targets within that country.

According to the Kaspersky researchers, early versions of Stuxnet were, in fact, created out of components that were part of what they refer to as the “Flame platform”. But they believe development of the two malicious programs diverged after 2009, suggesting that two different development teams may have been working independently for a single entity to create malware with specific objectives, according to Kaspersky researchers, writing on the company’s blog, Securelist.

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Tags: Barack Obama, Cyber Attack, Cyber War, Flame, Global News, Government, Kaspersky Lab, Obama administration, Politics, Stuxnet, U.S.

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“: Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Computer virus, Cyber Attack, Cyber War, Global News, Government, Iran, Obama administration, Politics, Stuxnet, U.S., War

Don’t miss (Flashback)!!!:

- 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.

Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Computer virus, Cyber Attack, Cyber War, Global News, Government, Iran, Obama administration, Politics, Stuxnet, U.S., War

- 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.

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Tags: Computer, Computer virus, Cyber Attack, Cyber War, Government, Israel, Politics, Stuxnet, U.S.