Stuxnet the Leading Edge of Sophisticated Espionage and Sabotage

Natanz Nuclear Enrichment Defense Iran Stuxnet appears to have been developed in the US and refined in Israel, before being introduced into Iranian computers by shadowy import-export companies. More from Wired:

In August 2009, Iran agreed to let the IAEA install surveillance cameras outside the enrichment facility to monitor any equipment that moved in or out. Suddenly, over a six-month period beginning late 2009, U.N. officials monitoring the surveillance images “watched in amazement” as Iranian workers “dismantled more than 10 percent of the plant’s 9,000 centrifuge machines used to enrich uranium,” according to the Washington Post. “Then, just as remarkably, hundreds of new machines arrived at the plant to replace the ones that were lost.”

Investigators described the effort as a feverish attempt to contain damage and replace broken parts, suggesting the centrifuges had indeed been operational when they broke.

“That it was 1,000 centrifuges and that it happened over a short period of time and the Iranians were upset about it” indicates the centrifuges were spinning or under vacuum – a preparation stage – when they broke, says Albright. “Because of the surprise and rapidity of all this happening, it indicates this.”

One other piece of information suggests Iran’s nuclear program was the target of Natanz. Last week security firm Symantec released a report revealing that the Stuxnet attack targeted five organizations in Iran that were infected first in an effort to spread the malware to Natanz.

Because Natanz’s PLCs are not connected to the internet, the best hope of attacking them – short of planting a mole inside Natanz – was infecting other computers that could serve as a gateway to the Natanz PLC. For example, infecting computers belonging to a contractor in charge of installing software at Natanz could help get the malware onto the Natanz system.

Symantec said the companies were hit in attacks in June and July 2009 and in March, April and May 2010. Symantec didn’t name the five organizations but said that they all “have a presence in Iran” and are involved in industrial processes.

Albright managed to glean from discussions with Symantec that some of the companies are involved in the acquisition and assembling of PLCs. What’s more, Symantec researchers told Albright that they found the names of some of the companies on suspect entity lists – lists of firms and organizations suspected of violating non-proliferation agreements by procuring parts for Iran’s nuclear program. _Wired

No one will shed tears for the Iranian nuclear weapons program, nor for the international companies which are illegally aiding the Iranians. But this attack is just the tip of the iceberg, and a mere suggestion of the wave of more sophisticated forms of sabotage, espionage, and covert warfare which is on the way.

Targeted acts of sabotage disrupt, but the real pay-off comes from identifying the human and technical links in the chain of command. Observing who responds – and when – to worm-driven destruction helps illuminate who really runs Iran’s nuclear infrastructures. Real-world Iranian responses offer critical clues as to which scientists, administrators and engineers are trusted and who is suspect. The chance to monitor Iran’s response would be of great interest to Mossad, the International Atomic Energy Agency, America’s CIA and/or Britain’s GCHQ.

Crafting a worm that generates potential insight into all those issues represents an intelligence coup. It is as potentially revelatory as a WikiLeaks data dump. That is why interpreting Stuxnet as desperate stop-gap or one-off intervention almost certainly misunderstands its purpose. Sabotage here is a means to an end; it is a gambit to make Iran’s nuclear processes more transparent.

Iran’s nuclear elite and Ministry of Intelligence know this. It is no secret now to the mullahs that their responses to the Stuxnet breach were closely monitored by external intelligence agencies. Their internal security is furiously trying to assess what information might have inadvertently been revealed. _FT

Stuxnet's sophistication is considered to be unprecedented. But from now on, Stuxnet will be the benchmark against which future spyware and malware will be gauged.

Mr Salem [of Symantec] said new technology and new approaches are needed.

"I run the largest security company in the world. I get up and people say I have a vested interest (in pushing this line). But my job is to protect and provide security and when we say critical infrastructure is under attack, it is real."

Mr Salem mapped out a number of strategic steps that need to be taken to guard against the next major cyber attack. They include an early warning system, better intelligence on what attacks could happen, better protection, the ability to anticipate what any threat could look like and the ability to clean up after an attack.

He also pointed to a role for government that might involve a counter attack or strike.

The idea of a kill switch to allow the government to switch off the internet if it is under attack is one he did not seem overly enthusiastic about.

"The ability for us to turn something off like that and not cause other massive disruption would be very hard. We are becoming more and more dependent on the internet. There are better approaches than trying to shut off the internet. _BBC

This growing dependency on the internet can be seen at all levels of every society in the advanced world. It represents a growing vulnerability -- given the revelation of what malware like Stuxnet can do -- and needs to be addressed now, before societies move to depend upon an even more vulnerable "smart grid" power system.

The threat is real, and the threat is now.

More than 100 foreign intelligence agencies have tried to breach United States defence networks, largely to steal military plans and weapons systems designs, a top Pentagon official said. _NZHerald

Consequently, the US Pentagon is seeking half a billion US dollars to develop new cyber technologies -- including powerful new defenses to guard agains the powerful new cyber-attack threats.

The $500 million is part of the Pentagon’s 2012 budget request of $2.3 billion to improve the Defense Department’s cyber capabilities. At a Pentagon news conference yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the research money, to be spent through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, “big investment dollars, looking to the future.”

The military is reaching out to commercial companies for the latest technologies and technical experts to safeguard the Pentagon’s computer networks from attacks and espionage, Lynn said. The effort is part of a “comprehensive cyber strategy called Cyber 3.0,” he said. _Bloomberg

The djinn is long out of the bottle, wreaking havoc on uranium enrichment centrifuge cyber systems. Similar djinns will soon fly out, based upon similar advanced cyber technology, with wider mission profiles and less selective targeting.

But regular readers of Al Fin blogs will understand that this cyber threat -- for all its potential for disruption and destruction -- is only the visible and more imaginable problem. More creative and malicious destructors are on the way, as advanced sciences and technology merge with unimaginably sophisticated hardware and software.

This is the start of the long war, which may either result in humans sinking to a pre-technological level for hundreds or thousands of years, or in humans transcending their monkey natures on the way to the wide-open next level. Watch and see.

Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.

Madrasas for Leftists: PC Universities Doomed?

There once was a time when the university environments of North America were not ones of indoctrination and brainwashing, as they often are now. Professor Alan Kors remembers those days:

I was taught at Princeton, in the early 1960s—in history and literature, above all—before the congeries that we term "the '60s" began. Most of my professors were probably men of the left—that's what the surveys tell me—but that fact was never apparent to me, because, except in rare cases, their politics or even their ideological leanings were not inferable from their teaching or syllabi. Reasoned and informed dissent from professorial devil's advocacy or interpretation was encouraged and rewarded, including challenges to the very terms of an examination question.

...In grad school at Harvard, while a few dates left in the midst of dinner on discovering my free-market and hawkish politics, and while I did get thrown out of a party for opposing, when asked, Eugene McCarthy's view of Vietnam (this should have been a warning), the classroom remained open and, by design, intellectually pluralistic....When I went off on job interviews, I was not once asked a question, ever, about my worldview, but only about my historical research and notions of teaching. Politics were simply not in the category of appropriate inquiry.

...What has changed? In terms of the university in loco parentis, which has been restored and expanded with a vengeance, the revolution has been breathtaking....From diverse motives of ideological sympathies and acute awareness of who can blackball their next career moves, they have given over the humanities, the soft social sciences and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics. In the latter case, it truly has been a conspiracy, with networking and common plans. In the former case—the professoriate and the curriculum—it is generally, with striking politicized exceptions, a soft tyranny of groupthink, unconscious bias and self-inflated sense of a mission of demystification. Most of the professors I meet are kind, indeed sweet, and certainly mean no harm. It is profoundly sad to see what they have become.

There also has been, compounding academic problems, a dumbing down of the professoriate that quite numbs the mind—best seen not in the monographs that earn people their degrees, but in the egregious nonsense, crude meta-theorizing, self-indulgence and tendentious special pleading that are not merely tolerated without criticism, but rewarded at the highest levels.

...Academia also has become a place where professors can achieve the highest rewards, except in the protected fields, for acting out their pathologies. In higher education, to paraphrase the Woody Allen stand-up line, we increasingly send our students to schools for learning-disabled and emotionally disturbed teachers....

Academics, in their own minds, face an almost insoluble problem of time. How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society? How can they make them understand, with only four years to do so, that capitalism and individual- ism have created cultures that are cruel, inefficient, racist, sexist and homophobic, with oppressive caste systems, mental and behavioral? How, in such a brief period, can they enlighten "minorities," including women (the majority of students), about the "internalization" of their oppression (today's equivalent of false consciousness)? How, in only eight semesters, might they use the classroom, curriculum and university in loco parentis to create a radical leadership among what they see as the victim groups of our society, and to make the heirs of successful families uneasy in the moral right of their possessions and opportunities? Given those constraints, why in the world should they complicate their awesome task by hiring anyone who disagrees with them? __WSJ__via_BelmontClub

In fact, Kors is understating the case--pulling his punches. The reality of the modern university is worse than he describes.

Richard Fernandez thinks that the age of academic indoctrination may be nearing its end. He draws that reassurance from J. Richard Gott's "doomsday argument. It is an interesting argument, related to the "anthropic principle" argument in nature. Thought-provoking, but not conclusive.

I sincerely hope that Fernandez (aka "Wretchard") is right. Universities of indoctrination are spewing out minds that are increasingly incapable of standard reasoning and logic. Too often a graduate of a liberal arts or social science program has never been exposed to divergent points of view--never learned to confront intelligent and reasonable people whose deeply held and closely reasoned ideas differ substantially from their own. Naturally he goes out into the world believing that all right-minded persons will believe as he does, and that all others are either dishonest, corrupt, or stupid.

All of that, before his pre-frontal lobes have even completely myelinated--before his powers of judgment have even come close to maturing. How could he possibly know better, unless someone at some point was willing to force him to delve deeply into diverse disciplines of thought and reason?

As Kors explains in his piece above, those halcyon days of intellectual diversity in the university are as good as gone. But is Fernandez right in supposing that this monolithic thought structure, this incompetence, this intolerance, is soon to meet its doom?

Society--in the form of the news and entertainment media, popular culture--has bonded itself to the PC worldview monoculture of the universities. Government bureaucracy increasingly adopts the same forms, and the bureaucracies of corporations and non-profit foundations have been increasingly moulding themselves according to PC intolerance.

There is no doubt that civilisation is attempting to transition from a religion-dominant culture to a secular-dominant culture. But it is not that easy. Society abhors the moral vacuum of the "middle ground." Secular morality has not truly stepped into the gap to provide a firm foundation for sound child-raising or a decent society. Leftist ideology has attempted to fill the void via many universities and much of the media, but for some reason, it has only done half the job. It has torn down most of the traditional moral icons of the civilisation, but its own moral forms have not been widely taken up by the society at large.

So instead of a culture confidently stepping out into the wide-open future, you see a fearful and insecure society full of self-doubt, questioning its own right to exist in the face of widespread poverty and misery elsewhere in the world. Entire nations are shrinking into the moral void, choosing anti-natalist ideas or going after comfort and security instead of taking risks on a wider future.

The human extinction movements are merely the extreme end point toward which a large part of the university educated are shuffling. Choosing to avoid children, or avoiding marriage altogether are other points along the same scale.

The quasi-suicidal carbon hysteria movement is a mere symptom of the basic intellectual nihilism that has followed university graduates into the culture at large. The true problem underlying the symptom is an inability to test hypotheses and theorems. If the hypothesis meets the long-term requirements of your ideology, put your emotions behind the idea, avoid the rational testing stage altogether, and use all the tools of human persuasion in your bag to put the idea over.

There are many other symptoms of the underlying problem, and it would be nice if we could deal with them all, one by one. That will be left to others, such as FIRE. Al Fin's emphasis will continue to focus on efforts to bring the "next level" into reality. The dumbing down of university students and graduates--and thus the dumbing down of society in general--does not help Al Fin's task.

Derived from a previous posting at Al Fin

War in Iraq, Afghanistan,(and Iran and Syia?)

I was opposed to the war in Iraq for about a year, unconvinced of the basic arguments for the conflict. I still don't buy the rationale that our military members are dying to help the Iraqis have their own modern, prosperous, democratic government. Democracy is over-rated, for one thing. Democracy is rule of the mob, by the mob, for the mob. If the arabs get true democracy, they will get one man, one vote, one time. Not worth dying for at all.

In my mind, there is only one excuse for maintaining a western troop presence in the muslim arab world. Muslim arabs have different brains than westerners. The Koran is qualitatively different than any "book of wisdom" that most westerners now take seriously. Tribal arab traditions are thousands of years away from modern western mores and traditions.

Currently, there is an arab youth bulge (also present in Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and many other muslim nations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East). Arab and other muslim youth are easily led into jihad by their imams, mullahs, ayatollahs and other clerics. One fanatical suicidal jihadi can do billions, even trillions of dollars of economic destruction, and kill many thousands of lives, if backed up by enough money and weapons expertise. It's not a laughing matter to be brushed aside as if it did not exist.

It's like the Dutch boy with his finger plugging the leaking dike. Temporarily, while this youth bulge lasts, it may very well be necessary to plug a large number "badly leaking holes" in the muslim (esp arab) world. People we care about will probably die in doing this. That's not a matter to be brushed aside either. But death in this inevitable conflict is a given.

How much death will be inevitable? How little death can we get away with and still keep fanatical and collectivist forces at bay? After all, once the next level kicks in, all of forces of collectivism and religious fanaticsm will be ineffectual against the potency of next level humans. But it will take time to midwife the next level, and the muslim youth bulge will continue during that time. In addition, the pressure cooker that is China, and the doomed ship that is Russia will continue to accumulate and improve the accuracy of their nuclear arsenals. Pacifism is not an option for the big kid on the block, the king of the hill.

So how small can we keep the death toll? More later.

Whither America and the West?

Here are two fascinating but contradictory viewpoints of where America is going compared to the rest of the world. This one from the Futurist paints an optimistic picture for America, and a less optimistic picture for others. This one from Audacious Epigone paints a much darker prediction for the US, but a brighter picture for some surprising countries.

Curiously, both are correct, as far as they go. The complete picture is far more complex than any number of short blog analyses could portray.

The US is walking a tightrope of demographic decline, as are Europe and Russia. China is walking a tightrope of infrastructure rot, as are Russia and the oil states. India is walking tightropes of simmering religious war, impending war with Pakistan and China, antiquated and corrupt bureaucratic structures, and disintegrative multiculturalism. Latin America walks tightropes of cultural incompetence and acute social stratification. Africa continues to lose its human capital at a hopeless rate. Muslim countries are drowning in the barbarity and utter primitiveness of tribal and religious customs and demands.

The question might be: who can prop up their economy and society the longest? Neither C41 at AE, nor the Futurist, discussed the possibility of large scale warfare. In my opinion, there is at least a 50:50 chance of such a thing occurring in the next 20 years, involving China, Russia, the US, and large portions of Central and Southern Asia, and the middle east.

New Zealand would be a fine country, if the leftists would all stay in the North Island, leaving the South Island for rational, hardworking, future-oriented people. In reality, people looking toward the next level will need to establish invisible enclaves within the countries best able to enforce the rule of law for the longest period of time.

When the breakthroughs happen in molecular manufacturing, machine intelligence, genetic therapies, space launch and propulsion, etc. etc., the people who are ready to bypass the "clutter" of between level bureaucracies and cultures will be in the best position to establish the next level.