OOPS – UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF UNLEASHING STUXNET VIRUS

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Posted on 10th November 2012 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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It’s called opening Pandora’s Box. We deserve whatever happens next. Fuck the Federal Government and their terroristic actions against other sovereign countries.

Stuxnet goes out of control: Chevron infected by anti-Iranian virus, others could be next

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.

California-based Chevron, a Fortune 500 company that’s among the biggest corporations in the world, admits this week that they discovered the Stuxnet worm on their systems back in 2010. Up until now, Chevron managed to make their finding a well-kept secret, and their disclosure published by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday marks the first time a US company has come clean about being infected by the virus intended for Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Mark Koelmel of the company’s earth sciences department says that they are likely to not be the last, though.

“We’re finding it in our systems and so are other companies,” says Koelmel. “So now we have to deal with this.”

Koelmel claims that the virus did not have any adverse effects on his company, which generated a quarter of a trillion dollars in revenue during 2011. As soon as Chevron identified the infection, it was taken care of immediately, he says. Other accidental targets might not be so lucky though, and the computer worm’s complex coding means it might be a while before anyone else becomes aware of the damage.

“I don’t think the US government even realized how far it had spread,” Koelmel adds.

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. Only as recently as this June, however, American officials with direct knowledge of the worm went public with Uncle Sam’s involvement.

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. Coupled with another malicious program named Flame and perhaps many more, Stuxnet was waged against Iran as part of an initiative given the codename “Olympic Games.” Rather than solely stealing intelligence through use of computer coding, the endeavor was believed to be the first cyberattack that intended to cause actual hard damage.

“Previous cyberattacks had effects limited to other computers,” Michael Hayden, the former chief of the CIA, explained to the Times earlier this year. “This is the first attack of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to effect physical destruction.”

On the record, the federal government maintains ignorance on the subject of Stuxnet. With American companies perhaps soon coming out of the woodwork to discuss how they were hit, though, the White House may have to finally admit that they’ve had direct involvement.

After the Times published their expose in June, Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of Intelligence Committee, called for an investigation to track down how the media was first made aware of America’s involvement in Olympic Games.

“I am deeply disturbed by the continuing leaks of classified information to the media, most recently regarding alleged cyber efforts targeting Iran’s nuclear program,” Feinstein said through a statement at the time. “I made it clear that disclosures of this type endanger American lives and undermine America’s national security.”

When Feinstein spoke to DC’s The Hill newspaper, she said, “the leak about the attack on Iran’s nuclear program could ‘to some extent’ provide justification for copycat attacks against the United States.” According to the chairwoman, “This is like an avalanche. It is very detrimental and, candidly, I found it very concerning. There’s no question that this kind of thing hurts our country.”

Just last month, a shadowy Iranian-based hacking group called The Qassam Cyber Fighters took credit for launching a cyberattack on the servers of Capital One Financial Corp. and BB&T Corp., two of the biggest names in the American banking industry. Days earlier, Google informed some of its American users that they may be targeted in a state-sponsored cyberattack from abroad, and computer experts insist that these assaults will only intensify over time.

“We absolutely have seen more activity from the Middle East, and in particular Iran has been increasingly active as they build up their cyber capabilities,” CrowdStrike Security President George Kurtz told the Times.

Speaking of the accidental impact Stuxnet could soon have in the US, Chevron’s Koelmel tells the Journal, “I think the downside of what they did is going to be far worse than what they actually accomplished.”

U.S. HYPOCRISY IS BREATHTAKING TO BEHOLD

55 comments

Posted on 13th October 2012 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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It is amazing to me that our government has the balls to act outraged at Iran’s use of cyberwarfare against Saudi Arabia and anyone else that is supporting America’s ongoing undeclared war against Iran. We are systematically destroying their economy. We have wiped out the savings of their middle class by causing hyperinflation with our economic sanctions. We have worked with Israel to murder Iranian scientists. WE released the stuxnet virus into Iranian computer systems, destroying hundreds of centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear facility.

The United States intitiated this war on Iran and now WE’RE outraged that they are fighting back. The hypocrisy of Panetta’s words is breathtaking to behold. Even sadder is the fact that 99.5% of Americans don’t even know we are at war with Iran. They will know when Iran is able to bring down our electrical grid or destroy one of our nuclear facilities. How dare they fight back. They’re supposed to cow down before the great American empire.

I’ve got news for the oligarchs running this show. Countries around the world are tiring of our bullying and bribery. We are an empire in decline. The rot is evident to anyone with a brain. The Chinese, Russians, Iranians and other countries around the world are not going to take it anymore. Our only hope would be withdrawing as the policeman of the world and adapting our economy to the new reality. There is no chance this will happen. The hubris of the ruling class will result in the inevitable fall of the empire.   

US warning reflects fears of Iranian cyberattack

By LOLITA C. BALDOR | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s pointed warning that the U.S. will strike back against a cyberattack underscores the Obama administration’s growing concern that Iran could be the first country to unleash cyberterrorism on America.

Panetta’s unusually strong comments Thursday came as former U.S. government officials and cybersecurity experts said the U.S. believes Iranian-based hackers were responsible for cyberattacks that devastated computer systems of Persian Gulf oil and gas companies.

Unencumbered by diplomatic or economic ties that restrain other nations from direct conflict with the U.S., Iran is an unpredictable foe that national security experts contend is not only capable but willing to use a sophisticated computer-based attack.

Panetta made it clear that the military is ready to retaliate — though he didn’t say how — if it believes the nation is threatened by a cyberattack, and he made it evident that the U.S. would consider a preemptive strike.

“Iran is a country for whom terror has simply been another tool in their foreign policy toolbox, and they are a country that feels it has less and less to lose by breaking the norms of the rest of the world,” said Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and now in private law practice. “If anybody is going to release irresponsible unlimited attacks, you’d expect it to be Iran.”

National security experts have long complained that the administration needs to be much more open about what the military could and would do if the U.S. were to be the victim of cyberattacks. They argue that such deterrence worked in the Cold War with Russia and would help convince would-be attackers that an assault on America would have dire results.

Panetta took the first steps toward answering those critics in a speech analysts said was a thinly veiled warning to Iran, and the opening salvo in the campaign to convince Tehran that any cyberattack against America would trigger a swift and deadly response.

“Potential aggressors should be aware that the United States has the capacity to locate them and hold them accountable for actions that harm America or its interests,” Panetta said in a speech in New York City to the Business Executives for National Security.

And while he did not directly connect Iran to the Gulf cyberattacks, he warned that Iran’s abilities were growing.

Security analysts agree.

The presumed Iranian cyberattacks hit the Saudi Arabian state oil company Aramco and Qatari natural gas producer RasGas using a virus, known as Shamoon, which can spread through networked computers and ultimately wipes out files by overwriting them.

In his speech, Panetta said the Shamoon virus replaced crucial system files at Aramco with the image of a burning U.S. flag, and also overwrote all data, rendering more than 30,000 computers useless and forcing them to be replaced. He said the Qatar attack was similar.

“This one worries me,” said Richard Bejtlich, chief security officer for the Virginia-based cybersecurity firm Mandiant.  “I’m not an alarmist, but when I saw that 30,000 computers at Saudi Aramco got just deleted, that was a big deal. You don’t see the Chinese government, you don’t see the Russian government, or even their patriotic hackers go out and delete anything for the most part.”

From the Iranians’ point of view, however, attacks against the U.S. may be justified because American sanctions leveled on the country for refusing to cooperate with international norms on its nuclear program have hit Iran hard. Tehran also believes that the U.S. and Israel were behind the Stuxnet cyberattack that forced the temporary shutdown of thousands of centrifuges at a nuclear facility there in 2010.

As a result, said Bejtlich, Iran already believes it is at war with the U.S.

Frank Cilluffo, , a former special assistant for homeland security to President George W. Bush, said U.S. authorities have suspected Iran of trying to plot cyberattacks against American targets, including nuclear plants. And he said that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps appears to now be trying to bring some of the patriotic hacker groups under its control, so it can draw on their abilities.

“Iran has been doing a lot of cyber saber-rattling,” said Cilluffo, now director of George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute. “What they lack in capabilities, they more than make up for in intent.”

Tehran has not made any public comment on Panetta’s comments, but the Iranians routinely report the discovery of viruses and other malicious programs in government, nuclear, oil and industrial networks, blaming Israel and the United States.

While Panetta’s warnings received high marks from security experts, those people also were quick to say that much more needs to be done.

The U.S., said former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, must lay out the rules of the road and figure out what kind of proof authorities would need before taking action.

“We still have work to do,” said Chertoff, who is now chairman of the Chertoff Group, a global security firm. “Will we take action to preempt something rather than simply retaliate, and how early and how much warning will we need before we take that action?”

He noted that most conflicts arise over misunderstandings, when one side doesn’t realize what the other will do if provoked.

The administration has repeatedly warned of the cybersecurity threats, particularly against critical infrastructure such as financial networks, transportation systems and utility companies. More recently, the White House has been considering using the president’s executive power to encourage critical industries to better protect their networks because legislation to do so stalled in Congress.

“While the message has been sent over and over again it doesn’t seem to have acquired urgency across the board,” said Chertoff. “We need to make it clear that this is not just background noise you have to deal with, but that it really strikes at the fundamentals of our national security.”

BARACK OBAMA IS A CYBER- TERRORIST

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Posted on 1st June 2012 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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Make no mistake about this. Barack Obama is a terrorist. We are not at war with Iran. He attacked a sovereign country using cyber-terrorism. When this is used against the United States, we will be outraged. When our President does it, he is insuring our national security. The people running this country are completely out of control and drunk with power. It will truly take an armed revolution to rid this country of the oligarchs calling the shots and running this country for the financial benefit of themselves and their cronies. Where is the outrage? Where are the protests from the champions of civil rights? I’m sure MSNBC will be holding Obama’s feet to the fire. Right?

Obama Ordered The “Code Stux”

 
Tyler Durden's picture

Submitted by Tyler Durdenon 06/01/2012 10:51 -0400

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“:

 
 

Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. 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.

 

“We discussed the irony, more than once,” one of his aides said. Another said that the administration was resistant to developing a “grand theory for a weapon whose possibilities they were still discovering.” Yet Mr. Obama concluded that when it came to stopping Iran, the United States had no other choice.

 

If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.

Some call it irony, others collateral damage where people lose everything, including their lives. Semantics.

Remember though: they hate America for its freedoms.

 
 

Mr. Obama has repeatedly told his aides that there are risks to using – and particularly to overusing – the weapon. In fact, no country’s infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States. It is only a matter of time, most experts believe, before it becomes the target of the same kind of weapon that the Americans have used, secretly, against Iran.

And it will be a shock, SHOCK  when the world retaliates against America.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES ARE A BITCH

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Posted on 6th March 2012 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues

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When you open pandora’s box you better be prepared for the consequences.