US cybers with Iran...
 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11388018


I've started getting my (US) news from sources without...and it's a lot more interesting...

1. Do you think we were behind this?

2. If Iran did the same to us would you consider it an act of war?

BTW...it pays to read most of the article on this one. Couple of really interesting things, especially the "zero-day exploits."

Definitely interesting. Imagine a successful attack like that implemented as a precursor to war. For instance, taking out a power/supply/defense infrastructure without destroying the actual facilities -- what if we'd toppled Saddam without dropping a single bomb? Pretty wild.

And the zero day exploits...makes you wonder if they were insider exploits instead. We'll never know. But they are absolutely right in that there was a large amount of expertise and resources put into it. You've got MS software vulnerabilities which aren't that rare, but the Siemens control software "hacks" definitely show industry/insider expertise was used.

If a nation successfully implemented (it's already been tried) an attack like this on us, you can count on it being treated as an act of war. Just disrupting systems for a few hours won't do much harm; a terrorist act or something otherwise destructive would probably come along with it.

And all this shows us is that we should not have critical systems linked to/through the internet.

Interesting read. I'm not much of a computer guy, but I get what their saying. I wouldn't doubt it if it was us, kinda of a good idea if it worked out.

A friend of mine went to Germany to teach English to German kids for a year, just after she got her teaching credential. She often talked about the difference in the news magazines, such as Time and Newsweek. She said that it seemed that our sources of information (Time etc.) were highly filtered, compared to the European versions. I've never tried to verify her claims, but I believe what she says. Her father is a high ranking military officer, and she is a well educated, well traveled, well respected grade school teacher, and a good friend for years.

As far as an act of war? Not so sure about that, dirty pool for sure, but not an act of war.

Urengoy-Surgut-Chelyabinsk natural gas pipeline.

Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

Pretty cool stuff. Sort of makes me feel like we are "in the future" with actual cyber warfare.

Are we behind it, very likely.

Act of war? No, not really. Sabotage isn't an act of war in my opinion. We and many countries do little stuff like this all the time (not in a cyber sense).

USB attacks are old news. The US military was attacked in a similar way, albeit a less badass virus, and now no Department Of Defense computers are allowed to use mass storage of any kind on the networks. This sounds like an attack that some MIT kids wanted to do, or a bunch of Koreans. There was nothing in the article stating that the virus was designed to shut down the nuclear projects or Bushehr, just cause havok. And just for the fact that Iran's systems were infected by USBs and mass storage screams failure on the information assurance side of Iran's networks.

Plus, it's really easy to find out if USB drives are infected in windows. Folder options -> show hidden files. USB viruses will always have a "Autorun.ini" file, and maybe even another hidden file that contains the virus if the autorun.ini file doesn't contain all the exploits or virus. It's also simple to disable anykind of autorun.ini on any mass storage, or to even set the group policy on a network to force a virus scan that cannot be stopped. You'd figure Iran's tech guys would know something about information assurance...