Don’t Bomb Iran

The NYT has a long, well researched article about Stuxnet (codename Olympic Games), from a new book.  It asserts that the US wrote Stuxnet to disable Iran’s centrifuges (an act of war?), but that Israeli changes led to it escaping Natanz and infecting computers worldwide, worrying Obama in top-level meetings.

 

Obama Ordered Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran – NYTimes.com.

 

Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

By DAVID E. SANGER Published: June 1, 2012 359 Comments

WASHINGTON — 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.

Hasan Sarbakhshian/Associated Press

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……[snip]

via Obama Ordered Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran – NYTimes.com.

Tags: cyberwar, flame, stuxnet