New York Times Reports US and Israel Behind Stuxnet

Oxford_Comma_Lover writes "Confirming heavy speculation in the Slashdot community, the New York Times reports that joint US-Israeli efforts were almost certainly behind the recent Stuxnet attack on Iran's nuclear program." The article stops just short of saying in so many words that Israeli is the doer, but leaves little doubt of its conclusion.

Re:From the No-**** Department...

[jmauro]

There was some decent evidence that it was actually a Chinese-Finnish operation [forbes.com]

My guess is when it's all declassified in 100 years or so we'll find out it was actually created out of different virus cross breeding and the Internet has been alive this entire time. Yea, I'll be shocked too.

Re:Still Speculative.

[timeOday]

Did you actually finish the article?

And the American expert in nuclear intelligence, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Israelis used machines of the P-1 style to test the effectiveness of Stuxnet.

The expert added that Israel worked in collaboration with the United States in targeting Iran, but that Washington was eager for "plausible deniability."

How much more direct could a confirmation be? The only question is the veracity of the anonymous source.

Re:Insertion

[plover]

Ummm... no. Flaws in Siemens' software (including exploiting default passwords in their package, and great difficulty in changing the passwords once deployed) were an important component in the worm's ability to insert the actual command codes into the industrial control systems. And if you'd have read TFA, you'd have seen that in 2008 Siemens met with Department of Homeland Security officials to go over the security of the SIEMATIC PCS 7 industrial control systems. The DHS had the most intimate knowledge of the weakness of Siemens' systems possible, having been asked to evaluate them for security flaws!

Given the sophistication of the worm, and the determination of the attackers, it's quite likely that it would have been written to infiltrate whatever systems they were running. Windows XP just happened to be very easy to target. But had it been a UNIX or Mac system, they would probably have found a way to get their malware installed anyway.

Re:When this happens to the US or its allies

[fishexe]

Right, OPEC... I'm absolutely certain that our biggest petroleum source in OPEC, Canada, would side with Iran should we go to war. That makes perfect sense.

Canada is not a member [wikipedia.org] of OPEC.