U.S. unleashed Stuxnet worm on Iran: leak

[The Northerner]

Exposing a dark underbelly of the U.S.' two-track strategy to contain Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions, a major leak to media outlets here revealed that President Barack Obama had, in parallel, authorised waves of crippling cyber-attacks aimed at destabilising the operation of Iran's key nuclear centrifuges.

While the Obama administration has repeatedly assured the international community that it would press Iran with only a combination of economic sanctions and an open window for diplomatic negotiations, news that the White House had teamed up with Israeli experts to unleash the so-called “Stuxnet” programme on Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment facility, for example, hinted at a more aggressive U.S. tack.

The leak hinted at the magnitude and impact of the U.S.-driven cyber-attacks suggesting that one specific series of attacks that occurred weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world “temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time.”

According to officials speaking to The New York Times, The Washington Post and others, the cyber-attacks authorised by Mr. Obama since his early days in office and codenamed “Olympic Games,” suffered their biggest exposure when Stuxnet became public in mid-2010 after a programming error resulted in it escaping Iranian systems and spreading around the world on the Internet.

News of the lethal worm's escape into cyberspace led to a “tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days” during which Mr. Obama was said to have asked Vice-President Joseph Biden and erstwhile Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon Panetta, “Should we shut this thing down?”

Read more: http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/article3480690.ece

[Cali_Democrat]

1. Wow! This is very surprising!

Now...the source code is available for all to see on the internet.

What happens if a terrorist organization refactors the code and uses it to compromise US power plants or any kind of infrastructure where Siemens controllers are used?

I don't think this was well thought out.

[frylock]

2. well that would be considered an act of war, wouldn't it?

[newblewtoo]

3. I am debating

which is more disturbing, the act or the disclosure. I am leaning toward the disclosure of the act. President Obama has indeed put himself in harms way from radicals with his bold actions against terrorists around the globe.