Reverse engineer how something like this was created and it is mind boggling. The initial intelligence gathering of the target systems, developing the plan of attack, recruit experts on the siemens hardware and physicists to explain the things that could go wrong, development and QA must have been grueling, since the expense of failure is so great! Never mind the deployment and monitoring to see if it was effective! They probably recreated the entire environment to test different ways to cause havoc.<p><i>Stuxnet recorded various data points while the cascades and centrifuges operated normally, in order to replay this data to operators once the sabotage began</i>. They must have had a working system to test this on?! The budget for something like this is probably in the tens of millions if not more. The HR requirement must have been pretty large too. Analysts to gather information, managers, programmers, qa, siemens hardware experts, physicists, deployment, monitoring, etc, etc.
We cannot begin to imagine the extent to which world military powers are currently developing and deploying cyberweapons.<p>Given the success of Stuxnet, it's nearly certain that such offensive cyberwarfare programs have gotten increased funding and support from the highest levels of command. From the article, Stuxnet 0.5 C&C servers first went online in 2005. 2005! George W. Bush ordered the deployment of Stuxnet!<p>I personally cannot wait to hear about what the cyberweapons fo 2013 look like.
"The 2007 variant resolves that mystery by making it clear that the 417 attack code had at one time been fully complete and enabled before the attackers disabled it in later versions of the weapon."<p>The thing that struck me most was the use of the word "weapon"[1]. Jeff Moss warned in his 2011 BlackHat opening speech that blurring the line between cyberwarfare and actual warfare is inevitable. Wired's use of "weapon" here signifies that shift, and really reinforces the fact that each one of us who is writing software may play a part in cyber wars, even if inadvertently.<p>[1]It may have been an unintentional use of "weapon," as Stuxnet is referred to as a "cyberweapon" throughout the article, but the point that we are moving towards describing cyber warfare as actual warfare still stands.
Mentions use of an obscure(?) Windows IPC mechanism: Windows mailslots (circa Windows 2000).<p><a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365130%28v=vs.85%29.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa36...</a><p><pre><code> * a pseudofile that resides in memory
* use standard file functions
* cannot be larger than 424 bytes when sent between computers
* can broadcast messages within a domain</code></pre>
Single page version here:<p><a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/02/new-stuxnet-variant-found/all/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/02/new-stuxnet-variant...</a>
On the third page of the article, there's a screenshot of the fake company website where the command and control servers resided, set up by the CIA/whoever back in 2006.<p>Today, if you search for the specific phrases used in the navigation bar, Google returns only 3 websites:<p><a href="https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=%22media+planning%22+philosophy+%22creative+services%22+%22search+solutions%22+ecrm+%22ad+serving%22&gbv=1&sei=PxUtUbzfBsWa2AXYkoCQAw" rel="nofollow">https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&output=search&...</a>
The terms are:
"media planning" philosophy "creative services" "search solutions" ecrm "ad serving"<p>Sadly, these sites just look spammy rather than fake sites set up by the CIA (and Alexa shows some SEO work has been done.... but that could be part of the facade).<p>Still, fishing for CIA CNC servers sounds like a fun game, they must be out there today. Anyone have any ideas how to find them?
The most amazing thing about stuxnet is that if hollywood were to make a movie about it we would find it too unrealistic, even if it was less fantastic than the real facts.
I wonder if such weapons have already been directed against our advanced fighters, ships, and submarines.<p>I remember reading about the COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) program in the late 90's and the use of Windows NT 4 on AEGIS vessels. Supposedly, there was a protocol for rebooting everything, every two weeks. Hopefully, nothing critical would be down the moment there was an attack. (To be fair, the NT4 kernel is rock solid, so long as you leave it unmolested, which Microsoft didn't.)
Am I missing something or had stuxnet started development before any of the centrifuges were installed? Was there perhaps an even larger game afoot which led Iran to choose certain hardware in the first place?<p>I suppose development of the software could have started without knowing which PLC's it would target eventually, but that seems doubtful to me. Of course, the easiest explanation is that I'm missing something in the timeline.
I remember when the "NSA" variable name was found in Windows source code that accidentally leaked out. Some people claimed that the NSA had backdoors into Windows and nearly everybody singed happily: <i>"Conspiracy theorists"</i>.<p>I'm not so sure that nowadays with all this Stuxnet insight people would be so hard-pressed to label these people conspiracy theorists.<p>Also, no more Windows source code did leak out with all the comments and variable names in the clear etc.<p>One has to wonder how "open" Windows actually is to the NSA and if all these 0-days so commonly found are really honest mistakes or not...