It is initially spread using infected USB flash drives and then uses other exploits to infect other WinCC computers in the network. Once inside the system it uses the default passwords to command the software.[3] Siemens, however, advises against changing the default passwords because it “could impact plant operations”.[16]The complexity of the software is very unusual for malware. The attack requires knowledge of industrial processes and an interest in attacking industrial infrastructure.[1][3] The number of used zero-day Windows exploits is also unusual, as zero-day Windows exploits are valued, and crackers do not normally waste the use of four different ones in the same worm.[6] Stuxnet is unusually large at half a megabyte in size,[17] and written in different programming languages (including C and C++) which is also irregular for malware.[1][3] It is digitally signed with two authentic certificates which were stolen[17] from two certification authorities (JMicron and Realtek) which helped it remain undetected for a relatively long period of time.[18] It also has the capability to upgrade via peer to peer, allowing it to be updated after the initial command and control server was disabled.[17][19] These capabilities would have required a team of people to program, as well as check that the malware would not crash the PLCs. Eric Byres, who has years of experience maintaining and troubleshooting Siemens systems, told Wired that writing the code would have taken many man-months, if not years.[17]
Which is all very technically interesting. But from a foreign policy standpoint, who launched it, aiming at what, for what purposes is even more interesting to me. Was it the US or Israel using a cyber attack to accomplish what an air raid on Iranian nuclear facilities couldn’t – and with less PR blowback? If so is it approximate to a covert ops teams sneaking into the country and blowing up the plant with C-4? What retaliation can we anticipate from Iran, perhaps an increase in coordinated Green Zone attacks? Of course the nature of cyberwar puts it more in the dark arts than clear conventional attacks – what are the ramifications if Russian programmers are running a false-flag operation to get Iran to think the US or Israel is attacking it? Is it a warning of “we could do more, at any time” – the equivilant of waking up to find a your prized horse’s head in your bead. The opaqueness makes it difficult for public debate – do cyberattacks fall underneath the War Powers Act? Does a cyber unit in Virginia that spends 60days building a virus to take out an Iranian nuke facility constitute “armed forces” “remaining for 60 days” in hostile actions? What if instead of a released virus it’s a long term series of coordinated attacks (similar to what the Pentagon is suffering). My quick summation is that this still falls under covert action – and with any covert action requires the careful balancing of secrecy and transparency. You can’t compromise a covert mission, but correspondingly, if covert missions percipitate an overt war – or even covert war – we need a method for which there is input, at least from Congress.
All of this plays into my concept of a formless warfare, from Sun Tzu’s quote: “Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.” which I’ll get into more later. But formless warfare is a new and emerging way for big countries to attack one another in this nuclear armed age. It is separate, unique, and inherently different than COIN actions of GWOT , and also separate and different from territorial considerations such as the Erythrian Theater (which overlaps but is itself different from the War on Terror). Formless warfare is a return to “big player” power politics – akin to late 19th early 20th century “board setting” between the major powers in Europe – when conventional forces were used to exert national policy. Two global wars and nuclear arms later – and you can no longer use conventional forces in that way. Unconventional forces are useful in proxy fight states, but their utility goes way down in an opposing nation state. In formless warfare however you use indirect or untraceable actions such as economic policy (currency manipulation, economic pressures and trade disputes), territorial disputes (through public forums) and cyberwar jointly deployed to acheive aims that conventional forces or covert ones could not. Unlike conventional warfare where nation states no longer are favored against smaller states (due to international pressures, treaties, and insurgency challenges); nuclear options aren’t necessarily viable – formless warfare allows top-power nation states to “punch at their weight” against other top-power nation states and absolutely clobber smaller states. (See also China’s defacto isolation of Tibet using economic policy.) I think Stuxnet may be the first opening gambit of formless warfare that we know about where the US might actually be counter punching at their weight on a smaller opponent – kind of like telling Iran – look, maybe we can’t send a flight to bomb your nuclear facilities, but we can still “get” you.
Either way, it’s interesting. I’m not sure we’ll see an Iranian nuclear facility blow up on TV as a result of Stuxnet, and I doubt we’ll ever know for sure who launched it, or what it’s launching has produced in counter-attacks – hence “formlessness”.
Tim C.
kingfrog
October 2 2010, 20:34:51 UTC
I think an excellent argument could be made that we are not on the precipice of formless war, but rather have been engaged in one for several years, and are only now beginning to wake up to the dangers involved.
Well, more fully wake up to them. There have always been people and agencies concerned at the concept that some systems are connected to the Internet with no underlying upside and an enormous downside.
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chapel_of_words
October 2 2010, 23:41:55 UTC
The scary thing about Stuxnet, if I’m reading it right, is that it doesn’t require internet connection. It’s introduced to a secure closed-circuit network via USB, and then hops around once in there.
Tim C.
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kingfrog
October 4 2010, 04:23:00 UTC
THAT’s exciting. It implies an inside person, or some good social engineering or targeted delivery.
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chapel_of_words
October 4 2010, 13:58:57 UTC
There’s a lot of interesting discussion and articles floating around regarding Stuxnet.
To me though – the cyber aspect perhaps is the sexiest of the formelss warfare, but if you look at what China’s doing on rare earth minerals, it’s recent reaction to Japan seizing it’s fisherman, policy on Tibet, the currency world war that Brazil’s finance minister declared is ongoing – all of these are aspects of formless warfare. Again to Clauswitz, war is policy by other means – the currency “war” is not to acheive a military or even geopolitical end (probably) but rather an economic policy objective (make one’s own exports more competitive). But it is certainly an aggressive action in that to win in currency, you must make someone else’s more expensive. Germany has been playing this currency aspect of formless war very well from buried inside the EU – and you can see the benefits of acheiving this economic policy objective in their recent economic numbers.
Tim C.
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logiphage
October 4 2010, 17:26:37 UTC
It’s important to bear in mind currency devaluation is good for the government and export interests but bad for most people and the nation as a whole. Making things more expensive generally can do nothing but slow down the economy, despite the fact you can point to certain specific beneficiaries of the policy.
The appropriate thing to do is buy up cheap Chinese goods as long as China wants to redistribute resources from their own people to foreigners. That’s exactly what they are doing. The wrong thing is to mimic their policy.
The same is true of course for tariffs. Good for government and export interests. Bad for everyone else.
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chapel_of_words
October 4 2010, 18:01:07 UTC
It’s important to bear in mind currency devaluation is good for the government and export interests but bad for most people and the nation as a whole.
Here, let me fix that for you, bring it up a level and it’s far more applicable:
It’s important to bear in mind warfare can be good for the government and certain interests but often is bad for most people and the nation as a whole.
Tim C.
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logiphage
October 4 2010, 18:20:40 UTC
Oh actually I was going to go more general than that;) But I was trying to keep it in the the economic arena so I didn’t. So what I was going to originally say is:
“Government action is good for the government and certain interests but is bad for most people and the nation as a whole.”
But was indeed is one of the most swell activities for government. You get to reward cronies with juicy arms contracts and then you get to reward them more contracts for foreign aid and reparations. Everyone wins! Except the citizens, of course.
War is the health of the state.
I think you can probably derive all of bad philosophy, economics, and ethics from the broken window fallacy.
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chapel_of_words
October 4 2010, 18:53:22 UTC
Hrm, you certainly did get to a higher broader level in your fix to my fix. =)
How about: “A government that seeks to prevent a harm, can do great good. But a government that seeks to enforce a good, can do great harm.”
You and I are of the relatively same opinion on war…which is why it always drives me nuts when these casual observers will trot out the pithy “war is good for business”, when it is absolutely anything but except for a very few crony capitalists.
Tim C.
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logiphage
October 4 2010, 22:56:43 UTC
“A government that seeks to prevent a harm, can do great good. But a government that seeks to enforce a good, can do great harm.”
I can get right on board with that too.
Re war, I’m a hawk at heart but a dove at brain, and for me brain always wins.
I find it interesting that people who instinctively understand you cannot end poverty by subsidizing it think you can spread ‘democracy’ by force.
History has shown none of these things work. We’ve been trying to force fix these problems since the progressive era. None of it works. We have more poverty and more little tyrant states than ever before.
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chapel_of_words
October 5 2010, 12:21:50 UTC
I find it interesting that people who instinctively understand you cannot end poverty by subsidizing it think you can spread ‘democracy’ by force.
I’m a Westphalian at heart, the internal affairs of another country should not be the causa belli on moral grounds. War should only ever be conducted for imminent national security reasons – the knock-on costs are just too expensive otherwise. Now – that doesn’t mean you abandon internal groups to the fates of their own governments, there is a world of policy options to choose from – but war should be the one of last resort, and only used in the interests of true national security.
Tim C.
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logiphage
October 5 2010, 16:37:39 UTC
I wish I could say I had that Westphalian impulse innately. I think most people are hawks or doves at heart and for none too noble reasons. But skepticism and consequentialism trumps nature. Interventionism, whether military or economic or social, doesn’t work except in rare cases on the margin and even then the long term consequences are not salutary.
but war should be the one of last resort
Totally agree. I can tell you I didn’t feel this way when I was in the 101st;)
But I will submit the policy to overwhelm aggression is what we did to the CCCP. And it wasn’t Reagan, sorry. (much as I think he was a minimally awful president, he didn’t destroy the CCCP)
All we did was remain more free, and I think that’s all we ever need to do in the long run. The more planned the economy the less efficient and eventually it just can’t maintain it’s own weight and certainly can’t compete. Like with Cuba. We never needed to embargo them. We needed to free our economy more and let our people do largely as they please and produce a lot of base materialistic crap that everyone in the world wants.
That’s why I think Keynes is arguably the most dangerous thing that ever happened to the planet because he enabled the planners. (tho someone would have invented it at some point, governments were desperate for a plausible rationale)
Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. Milton Freedom
There’s a reason we were a cultural hegemon for a century. It had nothing to do with government planning, except that we had relatively less planning than most countries.
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dorsai
October 5 2010, 19:25:17 UTC
But I will submit the policy to overwhelm aggression is what we did to the CCCP. And it wasn’t Reagan, sorry. (much as I think he was a minimally awful president, he didn’t destroy the CCCP)
Admittedly, the USSR was staggering pretty badly before Reagan came on the scene. But it *was* Reagan who tied their shoelaces together and gave them that last little shove.
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logiphage
October 5 2010, 19:44:56 UTC
Hehe I like the metaphor.
And I don’t disagree but as you pointed out it was going to happen soon anyway so I don’t think it was necessary to spend like a democrat, and I don’t think it was really intentional. I think it’s a bit of a self serving rationalization for the spending during his administration. Granted he had to deal with a democratic house but it was not required that he sign everything that came to him. Reagan could have balanced the budget and the Ruuskies would still have fallen. This would have been a much better fiscal and political result.
Reagan makes me sad. I’ve read the stuff he wrote and his interviews. He wasn’t a puppet at some point. He was smart and a good guy. He wasn’t giving lip service to liberty like most politicians. He believed it. You can’t write stuff like that and not believe it. His wasn’t a lukewarm belief in freedom nor an inarticulate one. Quite the opposite.
But something happened. And whatever the mechanism of his being co-opted is; if it happened to Reagan what possible hope is there for real change?
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dorsai
October 5 2010, 21:27:06 UTC
And I don’t disagree but as you pointed out it was going to happen soon anyway […]
Eh, not necessarily. Maybe it would have, maybe it wouldn’t. It’s easy to assume that their fall was inevitable, but there’s really no reason to believe that. Otherwise, how to explain the continued existence of North Korea and Cuba?
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logiphage
October 5 2010, 22:08:05 UTC
Well there are several reasons. One the soviets were trying to maintain the image of having a comparable military as the US. That’s expensive. Also it’s geographically vast. In order for anything to work with any efficiency at all you need a massive level of corruption. Corruption in a planned economy actually increases efficiency, ie it’s the way you get around the inefficient plans.
But that in itself undermines the acceptance of authority that an authoritarian government requires. IE, why are we obeying ‘the plan’, whatever it is, if the only way anything gets done is when we ignore the plan? When there is not the slightest inkling that the government is in any way legitimate then you’re vulnerable. Once your military culture is forced to become cynical and opportunistic in order to survive you’re definitely in trouble.
Cuba and NK don’t have those problems. They don’t care about massive inefficiency. They don’t need to maintain a credible military. They don’t even need to feed their populace. If you don’t care about anything but maintaining your totalitarian regime the problem becomes much more tractable. Not to say there’s no corruption in NK or Cuba but the horror of those nations is that it’s largely not corrupt, in the sense we think. People actually get shot for trying to bribe an official, and there are far too many true believers in authority.
That said it’s still not easy to do, as we see Cuba is backing away from communism. The Kim Jong-il dynasty also is not going to be viable to maintain in perpetuity. A bloodbath in the capital is only a matter of time.
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chapel_of_words
October 5 2010, 20:46:13 UTC
Not to get too down in the weeds here, I give Reagan full credit – but he shares the stage with two other men; Pope John Paul, and Mikhail Gorbachev. Between those three we owe an enormous debt of gratitude on specific actions they took, especially in the last few years leading up to the fall – to keep it as peaceful and bloodless as it was. (Although yes many wars can be linked to the demise of the USSR influence, the direct casua belli from the USSR breaking up itself, very few – rather old animosities were allowed to flourish again).
Tim C.
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dorsai
October 5 2010, 21:30:29 UTC
Reagan certainly didn’t do it all on his own, that’s very true. But neither was it some kind of historical inevitabiliy that the USSR would have collapsed regardless of whether it was Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, or Ted Kennedy in office. It was ready to go in the 1980s, but someone had to give it that final push – and that person was Ronald Reagan.
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chapel_of_words
October 6 2010, 02:10:49 UTC
Totally agree. I’d actually would put forth that, without those three I mentioned, all of them; you wouldn’t have had a “velvet” collapse as we did. With just Reagan, you might have still gotten the collapse, when you did (maybe, it’s easy to underestimate the effect Perestroika and Glasnost contributed to rapid decline), but it would’ve been far bloodier. Without any of them, we might be watching the implosion now, rather than in 1990.
Tim C.
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chapel_of_words
October 4 2010, 15:46:04 UTC
Some NY Times coverage of the currency fights breaking out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/world/04currency.html?hpw
Tim C.
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dorsai
October 4 2010, 18:43:24 UTC
I forget whether it was in connection with Stuxnet or something else, but I’ve heard of infected USB drives being dropped in parking lots for random employees to find and (hopefully) stick into their computer.
Let’s face it…what’s the first thing you think of when you find a USB drive laying around? “Hey, maybe there’s some good porn on here!”
🙂
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chapel_of_words
October 4 2010, 18:55:40 UTC
After seeing who fell for the Nigerian rental scam on our house – it absolutely destroys my faith in a truly cynnical humanity. =)
Tim C.
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mastertwisted
October 5 2010, 17:53:39 UTC
My first (and naive) thought would be “I wonder if I can identify who lost this by looking at the files.” I guess it also depends on where I found the stick.
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Wrong metaphor
sonof2ravens
October 4 2010, 13:19:52 UTC
It doesn’t help that military doesn’t seem to be up modern redundancy as the army DNS failure shows.
But I tend to agree with those that think cyberwar is the wrong metaphor.
http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2010/06/cyberwar-is-fiction.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/09/us-cyberwar-howard-schmidt
At best in military history terms it is closer to counting coup
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Re: Wrong metaphor
chapel_of_words
October 4 2010, 13:50:14 UTC
Thanks for the article links. Both articles predate Stuxnet – so I’d be released in any updates in thinking the authors might have. Stevens articles makes some very good points about the risk of defense contractors conflating our perceptions due to their profit motive and/or officials using the cyberwar metaphor as a proxy to expand greater control over the internet. Good points – our defense bloat is unsustainable and as Eisenhower warned pernicious in how it can effect national policy. But Stevens totally ignores any analysis of whether there is any threat that a country can make, and execute, via the cyber domain (as one aspect of formless warfare) that – were it done by soldiers or airplanes, would be considered by everyone an act of war. If Russia and China are mobilizing capability in this regard (either regular, irregular or dispersed as Graham discusses) why? Why do they spend more on that cyber capability than they might a new flight of bombers or a navy ship? Are they wrong? And if they’re wrong now, will they continue to be wrong in the future (like an ice aircraft carrier will simply never work) or are they just in a learning curve (like the tactical misueses of tanks).
The second writer is far more interesting, because he claims a startling personal capability: “I can disable the national power grids of half the countries in the world using nothing more than an iPhone.” Now assuming A) he can do that, and B) did that, while C) taking direct or indirect guidance from a command authority that D) furthers or combiend with other approaches furthers a national policy – is he executing an act of war? If you were going to invade a country and sent in a flight of B52’s to knock off the power grid (Yugoslavia 99), no one questions if that’s an act of war. Same if you send in covert military teams. What if you used a hacker? I’d still argue that’s part of the general intent of executing a war. Now if the hacker is doing it just for kicks, or to black-hat ransom money – those can fit in amateur and/or criminal domains better.
He also points out another front on the formless warfare discussion – the fostering of dispersed groups (Nashi, the hyper nationalist hackers in China, the Basji) that are instruments of state power – without being directly controlled by the state. I think he misses that somehow this is a new thing (again to the Balkans and the interactions of informal militias on either side serving the policy interests without taking direct C&C). But the whole point of formless warfare is you aim a policy objective, without any fingerprints directly leading back to you.
If we go by Clauswitz, war is policy by other means; and my extension – diplomacy is war by other means – it all comes back to war, diplomacy – two of many tools available to the state – but primarily wielded to further a policy goal. The policy in question here is stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions – a state could try diplomacy (get them to agree not to do it), military along several different approaches (send in covert teams, invade the country outright, fighter sorties, cruise missle attacks, assassination), economic policy could be brought to bear (sanctions) etc. Each means to the end has to be evaluated both in terms of its practicality of acheiving the policy, and minimizing negative secondary effects. Outright invasion of Iran is probably (fortunately) off the table entirely.
If the Iran nuclear plants suffer a catastrophic failure, go Cherynoble or something, and kill dozens of irreplaceable high tech Iranian scientists – because of this virus – how does that differ from using a cruise missile to or flight of B-1’s to accomplish the same thing? Besides the formless aspects that Iran can’t directly point a finger at who did it unless they can crack who made/planted the virus.
Tim C.
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Re: Wrong metaphor
sonof2ravens
October 4 2010, 15:00:53 UTC
But the militias usualy had some contact even tho they acting often on their own. While idealistic hackers usual have no targetting directions.
If the Israelis cooked this up, it does fit their profile.
As a nation state Israel is more likely to engage in out of the box actions like assanitions. They take actions that others will pause on because it is traditionally viewed as destabilizing ( Selling nukes to South Africa, what ever happened to that anyway). So this would be up their alley. They also have good tech sectors.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/july-dec10/computervirus_10-01.html
Stuxnet is interesting in that it seems to designed not to propagate via the net but usb. Hence it is able to hit systems that should not be on the net. I hear it actually has an erase loop to remove itself from machines to prevent spreading via net.
USB is notorius vector. Most security audits find that simply seeding a parking lot of a target with USB drives will get a bite.
There been docuemented stories of USB with coalition data popping up in the Bazaars of Afghanastan & Iraq.
From what I’ve been reading this thing hits LC’s (logic controllers) and seems to be targeted toward their centerfuges.
Also there is a lot of Hollywood OS in what can be done in the main stream news. However we are seeing more Wintel work stastions in capacities that used to be the domain of other platforms. So the threat is growing.
I need to ask a friend who does work for ultilites for his thoughts.
He currently programming for the South African grid.
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Re: Wrong metaphor
chapel_of_words
October 4 2010, 15:48:30 UTC
Ask him about vulnerability of Supervisory Control & Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. Be interested in his response!
Tim C.
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Re: Wrong metaphor
chapel_of_words
October 4 2010, 15:54:18 UTC
One of the reasons I call this formless “warfare” is that I think, in these instances and ones that emerge, we are moving far beyond the idealistic hacker. Instead we’re talking about an acquired (freelance) or trained (career path) capability within nation-state armed forces/intelligence networks. As pointed out the difference between a SEAL and a gangbanger isn’t that they both use firearms to perpetuate violence, but rather the training, organization, command, targeting and reasons why they do something are the key difference. The tools of the idealistic hacker in the hands a uniform soldier operating on a lawful military order issued through their chain of command (or intelligent agency version of the same) is what I’m talking about.
Stuxnet is interesting in that it seems to designed not to propagate via the net but usb. Hence it is able to hit systems that should not be on the net. I hear it actually has an erase loop to remove itself from machines to prevent spreading via net.
This is why the more I look the more I find it fascinating. Surgical strike precision is not a traditional feature of amateur virus creation & distribution – why viruses are such a pain in the aft. But percision guided munitions has become defacto the way to go by the military because of it’s ability to target and exploit a weakness while minimizing blowback (civilian casualities, or in this case, inadvertantly hitting some other nuclear power plant…say in France).
seems to be targeted toward their centerfuges.
Do a google search on Iranian reduced capability to produce centerfuges, around 2009. That’s rumored to be one of the physical effects (~25% reduction in production centerfuges online)…btu that’s just speculation now. There’s also speculation there is a “catastrophic endgame” programmed in the virus – since they haven’t decoded it entirely yet.
Tim C.
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Re: Wrong metaphor
chapel_of_words
October 4 2010, 13:52:05 UTC
Counting coup is the exact opposite of formless warfare – since it is glory seeking by the individual. It does not further in any way policy of the tribe, indeed by undertaking it warriors might risk the policy (win the battle) by seeking personal prestige (count the coup). (Maybe warriors with lots of counted coup are more effective at negotiations down the road, so a tribe might pursue a policy of heavily glorified warriors to increase it’s negotiating capability – but that gets a bit far afield).
I think counting coup is probably dead in the modern sense, regardless of how some generals might view glory seeking for their own career. The way we use covert op teams (and have for decades) to further policy is a good example. We send in a team, who does something physically on the ground inclusive of military violence; an outcome/output is achieved, credit goes to the local country of note or unnamed sources – and the covert ops team slinks away. There is no “coup” from a policy level (though the covert guys may in their own social circle have a form of coup counted by missions they’ve been on). Indeed knowledge of who committed the act is exactly what you don’t want to have.
Tim C.
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Re: Wrong metaphor
sonof2ravens
October 4 2010, 14:36:48 UTC
True but a traditional hacker often leaves a tag however cryptic. Supposedly the is a date embedded in stuxnet that points to the Isralies. Tho it soundsweak to me.
I’ve often heard counterfeiters signed their works as well.
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Re: Wrong metaphor
chapel_of_words
October 4 2010, 14:53:22 UTC COLLAPSE
Oh totally agreed then on some traditional hackers are only counting coup. The mrytle connection also sounds weak to me, although it sounds better if some other power is trying to run a false-flag and blame Israeli to stick that in there. I’ve done a few false flags in a purely gaming environment and the trick is you make something very hard to find, but once found, very obvious as to the “flag” you’re trying to plant. Myrtyle fits those characteristics. It’s very hamfisted, but gamers fall for it every time, to the point I stopped using it because it became too easy – and sometimes – because they found it, they would create all manners of justifications to believe that the false flag was in fact the correct one. Sometimes it was totally inadvertant false-flag that took years and years of efforts to correct (ask me about Oath Chapels, demons and a room being chilled because a door had been left open sometime).
As Graham’s points out it’s incorrect to characterize “cyberweapons” as things requiring a “cyber disarmament treaty”. But I think what he points out, and what might be the difference between traditional hackers and what’s going on now, is the training and intent behind the attack. A traditional hacker might use an intrustion and attack to count coup, but a military or quasi-military group might use it to further a national policy. Again taking out a national grid for kicks is criminal, but not military. Doing it to further a military purpose, coordinated with that purpose, is inherently military. Given that it appears to have been specifically targeted at a specific Iranian nuclear type of facility – and degrading that facility is currently both the national policy of Israel and the US; and is certainly under military planning for targeting – to me satisfies the “coordination” aspect that takes this out of the realm of hackers just doing it for kicks. Is it possible that some formless group is attacking Iran because they can and agree with the US/Israel position (as Chinese hackers are wont to do at times when they support China versus an outside entity)….sure. But then one has to explain the sophistication/complexity of the virus and how it was put together, and the groups able to do that “for kicks” really drops off.
Tim C.