Researcher blames U.S., Israel for Stuxnet

Researcher blames U.S., Israel for Stuxnet
German security researcher Ralph Langner has told an audience at this years TED conference that the United States and Israel were most likely behind the Stuxnet malware.

He said that the malware was designed specifically to cripple systems related to Iran's nuclear program. Langner was one of the first researchers to show how Stuxnet is used to take control of industrial equipment. The most likely target of the malware was equipment used for the enrichment of uranium.



"My opinion is that Mossad is involved," he said. "There is only one leading source, and that is the United States."

Symantec had suggested in a report on Stuxnet that it would have taken a team of between 5 and 10 developers about six months to create the Stuxnet worm. Langner says they needed to have inside information to get the worm to its intended targets and to carry out its duties.

Analysts say that Stuxnet was likely designed to damage centrifuges used in the process of enriching uranium. The worm targeted programmable logic controllers (PLCs) made by Siemens, which are used to control a wide variety of industrial systems.

Iran's Interior Ministry denied earlier this week that Stuxnet was responsible for a shutdown at the Bushehr nuclear reactor. Despite the thorough analysis done of Stuxnet itself, there is no hard evidence to link either the United States or Israel to its development.

Written by: James Delahunty @ 5 Mar 2011 15:29
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Stuxnet
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  • 3 comments
  • plazma247

    HaHa well done Ralph, everyone already knew that, but when everyone looked away you were the only one left pointing... probably not the best idea.

    Stuxnet is sooo old news, its like a glimpse into the past and is no where near as frightening compared to whats going on and coming from all account.

    What the saying "WERE ALL DOOMMED, DOOOOMED I TELL YA"...

    One thing the new age of warfare does really prove is that the age of the brawn is gone and the age of the geek has really become, the age where mind and techno kung fu are winning out of real world problems and its the kids in the hall with their brain candy that are winning the wars and the age of face to face combat is starting the change.

    Look at the wiki situation, another good example of how information and world war 3 the information war has been a landscape changing situation that ultimately for good or bad has really influenced the face of the future...

    Annon with their unknown and organised army of the collective, the internet has changed us and society.

    I think the new generations waking upto a world now one saw coming, its a scary place, but maybe... just maybe a brave new world where men and women can think and exchange ideas and become free from the old world constraints of race, religion and region and move towards a world where every single person realises were one planet and one people.

    Who knows, although i dont condone what annon stands for or what they do, i do realise that the internet has given birth to a new way for people to say no and a new place where war can be waged and realise that its only just the start of things to come...

    6.3.2011 07:45 #1

  • attar

    So it wasn't the Vatican, Illuminati or the Klingon High Command.
    I guess it takes 'Researchers' a while to figure out what the rest of us figured out in ten seconds or so.

    6.3.2011 08:01 #2

  • plazma247

    you forgot the nwo and builder burg ...

    Although i heard it was a romulan consortium who staged it to look like the high command, lol

    And dont for get it was the America in independence day that made the magic virus that by some chance of luck was compatible and able to infiltrate alien tech, there's no chance for us if even the aliens kung fu is not as strong....

    And as for the team of 9 6 months to write i think its improbable if the deployment platform was already created it wouldn't take anywhere near that to test on a closed system using existing scripts and splicing them together. I think from concept to first release was probably weeks and not months, but these things would have been adjusted and improved along the way as real world issues that were not compensated for in the test environment, but assuming they wrote a p2p based deployment system for updates they could feed in the updates to the closed network target by the same way the original version found its way in.

    Cyber warfare is no so unlike rendition, its goes on all the time behind closed doors, its just largely we dont get to see it.

    6.3.2011 08:20 #3

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