2012-06-01

U.S. launches the Age of Cyberwarfare

While there has been talk of cyberwar for years and various attacks around the globe have been blamed on various foreign governments, with the U.S. often citing China as a source of mischief, it is the U.S. itself that has just given the green light to cyberwar. In what I can only assume is the Obama administration's attempt to look tough on Iran and supportive of Israel ahead of a tough election, they have publicly disclosed that they are behind the Stuxnet worm.

Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran
From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran's main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America's first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks - begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games - even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran's Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm's "escape," Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America's most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran's nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

"Should we shut this thing down?" Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president's national security team who were in the room.
The conclusion is key:
Mr. Obama has repeatedly told his aides that there are risks to using - and particularly to overusing - the weapon. In fact, no country's infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States. It is only a matter of time, most experts believe, before it becomes the target of the same kind of weapon that the Americans have used, secretly, against Iran.

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