Just a week ago, the
Flame
virus, suspected to be a weapon in a heretofore undeclared cyberwar,
was discovered by computer security experts. Now, unnamed U.S.
government
officials have told a
New York Times reporter that the
Stuxnet
worm, another sophisticated piece of malware that was discovered in
2010, was the brainchild of secretive U.S. and Israeli intelligence
agencies. Stuxnet, designed to deliver information about Iran’s
uranium enrichment program and subsequently hamper it, was clearly a cyberwarfare tool. But previous discussions of its authorship were, at best, a
series of educated guesses and unverified allegations.
The NYT reporter, David Sanger, says his U.S. government sources told him that the program responsible for
Stuxnet, code named “Olympic Games,” was initiated in 2006 at the behest of former president George W. Bush, but has since been
championed by Barack Obama. These sources told Sanger that Obama “decided to step up cyber-attacks on Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility,
even after the existence of the worm became public in 2010 after it leaked out onto the Internet.”
The highly-detailed
Times article, excerpted from Sanger’s
soon-to-be-released book, “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and
Surprising Use of American Power,” benefits from 18 months of
interviews with current and former American, European and Israeli
officials involved in the program, and several outside experts. In it,
Sanger reveals what Stuxnet was intended to do, how it managed to
conceal itself, why it remained effective even after a coding error
allowed it to escape the Natanz enrichment plant’s computer system and
eventually spread to the Internet, and even the decision making process
that led Obama to order that the cyberespionage program be continued.
According to the
Guardian, the U.S. National Security Agency and Israel’s Unit 8200 ended up as
collaborators on the project
because of U.S. fears that Israel would take it upon itself to end the
threat of Iranian nuclear weapons capability by leveling the plant. The
U.S. let Israel in on its plot in order to reassure its ally that Iran’s
nuclear efforts would be snuffed out without a single bomb being
dropped. The article quotes Sanger, who notes that to talk them down
from the ledge, “The Israelis would have to be convinced that the new
line of attack was working…The only way to convince them, several
officials said in interviews, was to have them deeply involved in every
aspect of the program.” But Sanger’s
New York Times article
notes that Israel’s technical expertise and unrivaled intelligence about
the Natanz facility’s operations helped to make it an attractive
partner.
For a while, the plan went off without a hitch, the U.S. officials told
Sanger. “The Iranians didn’t suspect foul play because no two attacks
were exactly alike," they said; and even in the midst of a full-bore
attack, the Stuxnet worm sent signals to the Natanz control room that
made readouts being monitored by engineers there appear to be perfectly
normal. "This may have been the most brilliant part of the code,” a U.S.
official told the
New York Times reporter.
How effective was it? Even after the malware’s existence became the subject of
worldwide buzz, an updated version of the worm destroyed about a thousand of the 5000 centrifuges then in operation.
Now that the United States has acknowledged responsibility for Stuxnet,
it naturally becomes the leading suspect in the case of the the Flame
virus. According to an
article in The Guardian,
Kaspersky Labs, a Russian computer security firm that has studied both
Stuxnet and Flame, confirms that the timing of the first Stuxnet attack
on Iran in June 2009 and the worm being outed almost a year later gibe
with the timeline proposed by the
New York Times' sources.
Asked if there were any conclusions about Flame’s origin that could be
drawn from the U.S. admission that it targeted Iran with Stuxnet,
Kaspersky said, “there are sufficient similarities between the two
worms to suggest they have the same source.”
The U.S. government, which denies that the Flame virus was part of the
Olympic Games program, maintains that it did not create that bit of
malware. But then again, that was its official stance regarding Stuxnet
until admitting it became politically expedient.
The
Guardian article calls it a tactical political strike meant to bolster President Obama’s hawkish
bona fides.
The Guardian
paints a picture of an Obama taking advantage of every opportunity to
counter assertions from the right that he is weak on military issues:
“The decision to reveal Obama's role in the cyberwar against Iran
follows hard on the heels of the highly political disclosure in an
election year that the president had taken a personal role in approving
terrorist targets for US drone strikes. And the depiction of his key
involvement in two major clandestine military operations follows
photographs last year showing him, as commander-in-chief, awaiting news
of the death of Osama bin Laden.”
According to Sanger’s sources, who say they participated in many
briefings on the progress of Olympic Games, Obama “was acutely aware
that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new
territory…He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American
acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons—even under the most
careful and limited circumstances—could enable other countries,
terrorists or hackers to
justify their own attacks.” These aides revealed Obama’s concern that because the United States’ infrastructure is so dependent on computer systems,
no country is more vulnerable to a similar type of attack.
It stands to reason that engaging in cyberwarfare would have a sobering
effect: It was almost exactly a year ago that the United States
drew a line in the sand, declaring that certain types of
cyberattacks can constitute an act of war. As one military official in a
Wall Street Journal article stated it: "If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks."
Will Iran retaliate? Experts say they’ve seen no evidence of a return
volley on the malware front. But there’s no guarantee that the country
and its allies aren’t plotting something that, while less sophisticated,
may be just as destructive.
Ref:
Spectrum
