In Iran, the worm turned

Well, the New York Times has paused from exploiting the Tucson shooting long enough to report some real news: confirmation (more or less) that it was indeed an American-Israeli computer "worm" that that infiltrated Iran's nuclear bomb program some months ago and set it back by years.

It seems that the Israelis cloned the Persian effort at a facility in the Negev desert, while a German-American program identified the weaknesses in the Siemens computers that the company had sold to Iran. That enabled the Idaho National Laboratory to develop the target Stuxnet worm, which sent the centrifuges spinning out of control while sending normal readings back to the Iranian technicians.

Launched by the Bush administration, the effort was speeded up after President Obama took office. Bipartisanship we can believe in!

The worm was apparently distributed fairly widely, but was so brilliantly contrived that it would only damage the centrifuges that were its intended target. A pleasing irony in the whole program is that the centrifuges (from the Netherlands to Pakistan to Iran) were so crude that the Americans, when they tried to clone the Iranian plant, had a terrible time getting them to work. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Sloppy work at the Natanz plant

Here's that Iranian nuclear plant that may or may not have been attacked by a computer virus. The NYT has a more thoughtful piece on the cyber assault in today's paper, with the most interesting bit being the conclusion that the attack was terribly sloppy. When have Israeli spooks every been sloppy? As an example of how good the IDF and Mossad are, the same story mentions that when Israeli jets destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor three years ago, the Syrian anti-aircraft batteries had been switched off, so they couldn't intercept.

The photo is credited to Majid Saeedi. Who do you suppose he works for? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Has the Israeli attack begun?

Almost in passing yesterday, the New York Times reported rumors that Iran's nuclear program is under attack by computer warriors--spooks that actually have access to the Iranian computers, which aren't connected to the internet. That requires three things: sophistication in cyberwarfare, a great desire to stop the Persian Bomb, and agents on the ground in Iran. The Gray Lady lists three leading suspects: the U.S., Israel, and Britain. Post-Blair, I think we can rule out the UK. The U.S. of course is a possibility--the Obama administration seems to favor standoff warfare to the belt-buckle sort, as it has displayed with its generous use of drone attacks in Pakistan. But after years--generations!--of emasculating the CIA, where would we get the agents capable of slipping a thumb drive into the computer that runs the Persian version of Los Alamos?

No, I'll lay my bet on Israel.  Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On cyberwarfare

I have blogged from time to time about the prospect of a cyberwar attack on the very vulnerable American communications system, which happens to include such little extras as the electric grid. So add this to the must-read list: Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It. It's not just malicious hackers, either, such as destabilized Ukraine shortly before the Russians invaded. Much of our computer hardware is built in China. It would be no great feat, the authors argue, for the builders to insert a "trapdoor" enabling someone (the People's Liberation Army, for example) to take over the computer at a time of its choosing. The result could be as devastating as a nuclear bomb--and no way of knowing where the attack came from. (And given the dependence of the U.S. military on "network-centric" warfare, perhaps no way of retaliating even if we did know.) Is this absurd? Perhaps not: the authors argue, for example, that the Israelis succeeded in taking over the Syrian air-defense system in 2007, thus clearing the way for their planes to destroy the secret nuclear reactor built by the North Koreans. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Another bloody century

This is a remarkably fine book, in which the Anglo-American war scholar Colin Gray takes an educated guess at what future warfare will be like. 'It is a rule in strategy,' he writes in one of his piquant declarations, 'one derived empirically from the evidence of two and a half millenia, that anything of great strategic importance to one belligerent, for that reason has to be worth attacking by others.' He happens to be speaking of space, and in particular the American communications satellites in earth orbit, but as China's recent hacking of American business sites has demonstrated, the warning is equally true of cyberspace. We depend on the internet more than most: ergo, the internet is a particularly inviting target for China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Al Qaeda, und so weiter. Eminently worth a read. Click here to find it on Amazon. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The new shape of war

He might not be your first choice for scaling the walls of Troy, but this soldier spends his days on the cyberwar front, and we can hope he's agile enough for that. In Foreign Policy yesterday, Robert Haddick discusses the silent menace of Chinese, Russian, and al-Qaeda cyber attacks. This is warfare at which the Other has all the advantages, given that the US is arguably the most open and the most networked nation in the world. He links to a lengthy document from the Center for a New American Security, Contested Commons. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

China also is interested in you

Yesterday I quoted the aphorism about war being interested in you, even if you weren't interested in war. This morning the NYT has a piece about cyberwarfare, which China has busily been waging against Google, other American corporations, and probably the US Defense Department and your personal email account. Concludes Thom Shanker of a simulated attack: 'The enemy had all the advantages: stealth, anonymity and unpredictability.'

Sounds a lot like the Taliban, doesn't it? Not to mention the Viet Cong, the Chindits, the Irish Republican Army, the Arab Legion, the Boers, Quantrill's Raiders, Commandante Theresa of the Peninsular Wars, the Minutemen, Roger's Rangers.... Irregulars have been baffling regulars ever since warfare was defined as the exclusive business of the nation-state, at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Cyberwarfare is just another front in this endless contest of the weak against the strong.

Colin Gray wrote a brilliant and overlooked book on the subject of how war was going to play out in the 21st century: Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare (Phoenix Press). I'm reading it now. I can't believe it wasn't required reading in War in the Modern World. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On not being evil

It's never wise to underestimate the cynicism of politicians and businessmen, but two cheers at least to Google, which has threatened to pull out of China unless the People's Republic (what a name!) backs down on its attempts to control internet search. It's pretty clear where the people stand in this dispute, as indicated by the flowers being placed on the Google logo.

The PRC seems to operate on a two-tier system, whereby the masses are heavily restricted and an elite are allowed to go around the restrictions, for example by using proxies and virtual networks. Silencing Google may have the odd result of making it even more influential among the minority with the skill and determination to 'scale the wall'--fanqiang--in reference to censorship's popular name as the Great Firewall of China. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford