Iran nuclear plants under threat.

[LordJaric]

Iranian facilities have been under attack from a complex computer worm called Stuxnet.

The real concern is that this worm doesn't steal or manipulate information, it takes over industrial control systems. If it take over a nuclear power plant, it could cause a nuclear meltdown. One of my concern is what if the person who made this takes it a step further and goes after military installations. This worm has also been seen in Indonesia, India and the U.S. Considering India and U.S. both have nukes that would be pretty bad.

[Korriken]

yep, there you have it. doomsday will be initiated by some 900 pound 15 year old who thought it would be funny to take over a military installation and launch nukes.

[LordJaric]

At 9/26/10 01:30 AM, Korriken wrote: yep, there you have it. doomsday will be initiated by some 900 pound 15 year old who thought it would be funny to take over a military installation and launch nukes.

you never know, they just might do that

[Tony-DarkGrave]

At 9/26/10 01:30 AM, Korriken wrote: yep, there you have it. doomsday will be initiated by some 900 pound 15 year old who thought it would be funny to take over a military installation and launch nukes.

I think it would be amusing to see Iran as a Radioactive parking lot personally.

[SolInvictus]

At 9/26/10 02:41 AM, Tony-DarkGrave wrote: I think it would be amusing to see Iran as a Radioactive parking lot personally.

new nuclear deterent? but i'm a little less interested in seeing signficant bits of countries getting irradiated.

[RydiaLockheart]

I wonder if it's sabotage by another country. If it were just Iran I'd suspect Israel but if it's other countries besides Iran I'm not so sure. If the Chinese can get into our power grid then who knows what else they or other countries with advanced computer technology are doing.

[Light]

I suspect that someone in Israel may be behind this, it would be convenient to have their enemy's power plants to be malfunctional....Hell, it'd be convenient for us all.

[lapis]

What shocked me when I first heard about this was that the computers that ran the plants' control systems were connected to the Internet. Are the gains of an Internet connection really so great that they outweigh the risks of a cyber attack? What worries me about this is that the two or so nuclear plants in my country are probably just as poorly secured as these Iranian plants, considering that the US is now "building specialized teams that can respond quickly to cyber emergencies at industrial facilities across the country".

[gumOnShoe]

At 9/26/10 02:53 AM, RydiaLockheart wrote: I wonder if it's sabotage by another country. If it were just Iran I'd suspect Israel but if it's other countries besides Iran I'm not so sure. If the Chinese can get into our power grid then who knows what else they or other countries with advanced computer technology are doing.

Israel might have the know how, but it's not necessarily true that they'd use a computer virus to try and do this. Iran has plenty of other enemies, anyways. There really aren't any countries besides Iran in the middle east that want Iran to be a nuclear power.

That said, the reports I was reading claim that the virus targets Iran specifically and is sophisticated enough that it was likely made by a team and it is professional enough to have been endorsed & financed by at least one government. That said, the virus targets the specific kind of linux platform used at the Iran nuclear plants. We should emphasize that this is aimed at nuclear plants. Unless Iran has nukes, which it claims it isn't trying to get and which it claims it doesn't have, this virus could only be used to sabotage the plants.

Aside from that, Iran has some very horrible protocols if it is indeed weak to this attack. Systems like that are supposed to be closed off from the internet 100% because they are high risk. It would be 10xs worse to connect this system up to the internet than it would be to connect a plane up to the internet. It is a bad idea, and hopefully Iran didn't do it. If they did, then they really shouldn't be building nuclear facilities.

[X-Gary-Gigax-X]

I tell ya, at the risk of sounding like a shady, black ops loving goon, a nuclear meltdown would be a good excuse to place an international-led ban on Iran's nuclear facilities (because, come on, we all know in our hearts what they really want to do with these)

[adrshepard]

At 9/26/10 06:38 AM, lapis wrote: What shocked me when I first heard about this was that the computers that ran the plants' control systems were connected to the Internet. Are the gains of an Internet connection really so great that they outweigh the risks of a cyber attack?

If it's anything like the potential cyber attacks that target the US, the vulnerability usually lies with a third-party contractor with an employee that screws up. I think they know the dangers.
I also don't think its targeted specifically at Iran, since the article says other countries have been hit with it too.

[Ravariel]

At 9/26/10 08:21 AM, gumOnShoe wrote:

At 9/26/10 02:53 AM, RydiaLockheart wrote: I wonder if it's sabotage by another country. If it were just Iran I'd suspect Israel but if it's other countries besides Iran I'm not so sure. If the Chinese can get into our power grid then who knows what else they or other countries with advanced computer technology are doing.

Israel might have the know how, but it's not necessarily true that they'd use a computer virus to try and do this. Iran has plenty of other enemies, anyways. There really aren't any countries besides Iran in the middle east that want Iran to be a nuclear power.

Strategically, though, this would be a brilliant way for an ally or non-confrontational country to stall or limit a potentially dangerous nuclear threat. It wouldn't surprise me if it was Israel, or the US or even China or Japan. I expect that it is, indeed, government sponsored... and my gut says it's probably actually not one of the countries most in danger from a nuclear Iran.

[TDwizBang]

ok, so there is no hot fuel in the reactor and Iran went public with the news... where Iran sits is that they just need to reload the system and unplug from the internet... might set them back depending on how complex the system is but seriously it should not be that long for a team of people that obviously have some kind of a knowledge of the systems they use... it is a nuclear reactor after all.

the options for speculation on this matter can go through the roof with this... despite the fact that other countries have come across this worm dosnt lead me to rule out that it is an inside job, after all there was a whole fiasco with a nuclear scientist who defected from Iran not to long ago and we never did get the whole story on that...

or maybe it is one of the Chinese government sanctioned hacking projects that no country wants to call them out on...

see the possibilities are endless but the real question i have to ask is that if several advanced countries know of the worm but dont know where it came from expect this to be a bigger problem in the future because they are obviously dealing with something beyond there control and it most likely will become more advanced, if it hasnt already and nobody knows about it

[Tony-DarkGrave]

good job SAD least you took the plant down for the next few months.

[lapis]

Here's a nice Q&A, giving some information about the worm even though much is still unclear. Apparently, the worm was spread to the plants' control systems not through the Internet but using infected USB drives. However, the USB drives may have been infected through computers connected to the Internet (the last part is a guess). When the plants are infected, they might spread the worm to other plants if they're part of their security and data collection network. Russian contractors with access to the systems might have used infected USB drives. The plants are connected to the Internet, as the worm apparently sent collected security data to a server in Malaysia. Experts say, however, that the main objective of the worm was not to gather data but to actually sabotage the plant(s).

Although the worm also infected plants in Indonesia, India, Pakistan and the US, the plant processes that it tampers with are so plant-specific that only a few Iranian plants would (hopefully) be affected - experts wonder whether the civilian nuclear power plant at Bushehr or the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz was the main target. It's safe to say that only a government's intelligence agency would have an interest in damaging a plant and know so much about plant specifics that it could manufacture a worm this specific. It's probably the Mossad who pulled this off, and I don't know if they enough about plant specifics in the US to guarantee that no plant in the US would be affected. Anyway, I don't think the worm can cause a meltdown but simply shut down centrifuge operation or something like that. What the worm actually did in Iran is still uncertain, bur going by Jogn Markoff, quoted in the article, "If Stuxnet is the latest example of what a government organization can do, it contains some glaring shortcomings," he writes. "The program was splattered on thousands of computer systems around the world, and much of its impact has been on those systems, rather than on what appears to have been its intended target, Iranian equipment."

At 9/26/10 08:21 AM, gumOnShoe wrote: That said, the virus targets the specific kind of linux platform used at the Iran nuclear plants.

The plants apparently ran Windows.

6. Why would anyone run a nuclear plant using Windows? I've got no answer for this one.

[mayeram]

At 9/28/10 06:57 AM, lapis wrote:

Anyway, I don't think the worm can cause a meltdown but simply shut down centrifuge operation or something like that.

I agree, my father is an electrical engineer that works specifically on transferring power from nuclear power plants to wherever it's needed.

I would be extremely surprised if an attack of this nature could cause something like a meltdown, that would indicate that the nuclear power plant was extremely poorly run in the first place and that the operators in the plant didn't know what they were doing. The operators could always disconnect the plant from the network physically and then shut down the plant. On the other hand, I could see this sort of attack being used to shut down the nuclear power plant for a short term.

If you wanted to attack the power industry in America, it would be as simple as having 50 people in cars with high powered guns or explosives. Things are starting to change now, but even up to a year ago the substations that relayed power from major power lines to more minor power lines were totally undefended. There is no one at the substations 90% of the time, there was no one monitoring security cameras or the like, there is nothing more than a chain fence keeping you from getting inside and there are sensitive systems that could be destroyed with some well placed bullets or an explosion. There are not that many replacements for those systems, so if you destroyed a bunch of them it would take months to replace and if you systematically had a small group of people destroy the major substations you could shut down power in an area for months. Imagine what harm that would do to the American economy if large areas were without power for months.