.
Obama’s effective bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities via Stuxnet cyber attack in 2009-2010 put a target on the backs of all Americans since Iran would be expected to retaliate.…US attempted to cripple Iran’s infrastructure, achieving with computer code the same destruction as bombing would. 11/13/2014, “How Obama Endangered Us All With Stuxnet,” Daily Beast, Kim Zetter: “Much has been said about Stuxnet in the years since its discovery. But little of that talk has focused on how use of the digital weapon undermined Obama’s stated priority of protecting critical infrastructure, placed that vulnerable infrastructure in the cross hairs of retaliatory attacks, and illuminated our country’s often-contradictory policies on cyberwarfare and critical infrastructure security.”…
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Added: US infrastructure is more vulnerable to attack than any other country because it’s more dependent on computer systems:
“”This is the first attack of a major nature in which a cyber attack was used to effect physical destruction,” said former CIA chief Michael V. Hayden….”It is only a matter of time, most experts believe, before it [the US] becomes the target of the same kind of weapon that the Americans have used, secretly, against Iran….No country’s infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States.””
6/1/2012, “Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran,“ NY Times, David E. Sanger (Article adapted from “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” by David E. Sanger of NY Times, published by Crown)
“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 [later known as Stuxnet] — 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.
Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed.
In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of
the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series
of attacks, a few 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 to purify uranium.
This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program
is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former
American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as
well as a range of outside experts. None would allow their names to be
used because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day [as of June 2012].
These officials gave differing assessments of how successful the sabotage program was in
slowing Iran’s progress toward developing the ability to build nuclear
weapons. Internal Obama administration estimates say the effort was set
back by 18 months to two years, but some experts inside and outside the
government are more skeptical, noting that Iran’s enrichment levels have
steadily recovered, giving the country enough fuel today for five or
more weapons, with additional enrichment.
Whether Iran is still trying to design and build a weapon is in dispute.
The most recent United States intelligence estimate concludes that Iran
suspended major parts of its weaponization effort after 2003, though
there is evidence that some remnants of it continue.
Iran initially denied that its enrichment facilities had been hit by Stuxnet, then said it had found the worm and contained it. Last
year, the nation announced that it had begun its own military
cyberunit, and Brig. Gen. Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s Passive
Defense Organization, said that the Iranian military was prepared “to
fight our enemies” in “cyberspace and Internet warfare.” But there has
been scant evidence that it has begun to strike back.
The United States government only recently acknowledged developing
cyberweapons, and it has never admitted using them [as of June 2012.
Later, 10/17/2016, an Obama confidant pleaded guilty to “leaking” news about US and Stuxnet: “‘Obama’s General’ Pleads Guilty to Leaking Stuxnet Operation [to David E. Sanger of the NY Times and to a Newsweek reporter],” Foreign Policy. And Obama pardoned him: 1/17/2017, “Obama Pardons James Cartwright, General Who Lied to F.B.I. in Leak,” NY Times].
There have been reports of one-time attacks against personal computers
used by members of Al Qaeda, and of contemplated attacks against the
computers that run air defense systems, including during the NATO-led
air attack on Libya last year. But Olympic Games [Stuxnet] was of an entirely different type and sophistication.
It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyber weapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country
or sending in agents to plant explosives. The code itself is 50 times
as big as the typical computer worm, Carey Nachenberg, a vice president
of Symantec, one of the many groups that have dissected the code, said
at a symposium at Stanford University in April. Those forensic
investigations into the inner workings of the code, while picking apart
how it worked, came to no conclusions about who was responsible.
A similar process is now under way to figure out the origins of another cyberweapon called Flame that was recently discovered to have attacked the computers of Iranian officials, sweeping up information from those machines. But the computer code appears to be at least five years old, and American officials say that it was not part of Olympic Games. They have declined to say whether the United States was responsible for the Flame attack.
Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games [Stuxnet], was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyber weapons-even under the most careful and limited circumstances-could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks….
Yet Mr. Obama concluded that when it came to stopping Iran, the United States had no other choice.
If Olympic Games [Stuxnet] failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.
The impetus for Olympic Games [Stuxnet] dates from 2006, when President George W. Bush saw few good options in dealing with Iran. At the time, America’s European allies were divided about the cost that imposing sanctions on Iran would have on their own economies. Having falsely accused Saddam Hussein of reconstituting his nuclear program in Iraq, Mr. Bush had little credibility in publicly discussing
another nation’s nuclear ambitions. The Iranians seemed to sense his
vulnerability, and, frustrated by negotiations, they resumed enriching
uranium at an underground site at Natanz, one whose existence had been
exposed just three years before….
Hawks in the Bush administration like Vice President Dick Cheney urged Mr. Bush to consider a military strike against the Iranian nuclear facilities before
they could produce fuel suitable for a weapon. Several times, the
administration reviewed military options and concluded that they would
only further inflame a region already at war, and would have uncertain
results.
For years the C.I.A. had introduced faulty parts and designs into Iran’s systems–even tinkering with imported power supplies so that they would blow up–but the sabotage had had relatively little effect. General James E. Cartwright,
who had established a small cyberoperation inside the United States
Strategic Command, which is responsible for many of America’s nuclear
forces, joined intelligence officials in presenting a radical new idea to Mr. Bush and his national security team. It involved a far more sophisticated cyber weapon than the United States had designed before.
The goal was to gain access to the Natanz plant’s industrial computer controls.
That required leaping the electronic moat that cut the Natanz plant off
from the Internet — called the air gap, because it physically separates
the facility from the outside world. The computer code would invade the specialized computers that command the centrifuges.
The first stage in the effort was to develop a bit of computer
code called a beacon that could be inserted into the computers, which
were made by the German company Siemens and an Iranian manufacturer,
to map their operations. The idea was to draw the equivalent of an
electrical blueprint of the Natanz plant, to understand how the
computers control the giant silvery centrifuges that spin at tremendous
speeds. The connections were complex, and unless every circuit was
understood, efforts to seize control of the centrifuges could fail….
When Colonel Qaddafi gave up his nuclear weapons program in 2003, he turned over the centrifuges he had bought from the Pakistani nuclear ring, and they were placed in storage at a weapons laboratory in Tennessee. The military and intelligence officials overseeing Olympic Games [Stuxnet] borrowed some for what they termed “destructive testing,” essentially building a virtual replica of Natanz, but spreading the test over several of the Energy Department’s national laboratories to keep even the most trusted nuclear workers from figuring out what was afoot.
Those first small-scale tests were surprisingly successful: the bug invaded the computers, lurking for days or weeks, before sending instructions to speed them up or slow them down so suddenly that
their delicate parts, spinning at supersonic speeds, self-destructed.
After several false starts, it worked. One day, toward the end of Mr.
Bush’s term, the rubble of a centrifuge was spread out on the conference
table in the Situation Room, proof of the potential power of a
cyberweapon. The worm was declared ready to test against the real target: Iran’s underground enrichment plant.
“Previous cyber attacks had effects limited to other computers,” Michael V. Hayden, the former chief of the C.I.A., said, declining to describe what he knew of these attacks when he was in office. “This is the first attack of a major nature in which a cyber attack was used to effect physical destruction,” rather than just slow another computer, or hack into it to steal data….
In fact, thumb drives turned out to be critical in spreading the first variants of the computer worm; later, more sophisticated methods were developed to deliver the malicious code.
The first attacks were small, and when the centrifuges began
spinning out of control in 2008, the Iranians were mystified about the
cause, according to intercepts that the United States later picked
up. “The thinking was that the Iranians would blame bad parts, or bad
engineering, or just incompetence,” one of the architects of the early
attack said.
The Iranians were confused partly because no two attacks were exactly alike. Moreover, the code would lurk inside the plant for weeks, recording normal operations; when it attacked, it sent signals to the Natanz control room indicating that everything downstairs was operating normally. “This may have been the most brilliant part of the code,” one American official said….
But by the time Mr. Bush left office, no wholesale destruction had
been accomplished. Meeting with Mr. Obama in the White House days
before his inauguration, Mr. Bush urged him to preserve two classified programs, Olympic Games [Stuxnet] and the drone program in Pakistan. Mr. Obama took Mr. Bush’s advice.
Mr. Obama came to office with an interest in cyber issues, but he had discussed them during the campaign mostly in terms of threats to personal privacy and the risks to infrastructure like the electrical grid and the air traffic control system. He commissioned a major study on how to improve America’s defenses and announced it with great fanfare in the East Room.
What he did not say then was that he was also learning the arts of cyberwar.
The architects of Olympic Games would meet him in the Situation Room,
often with what they called the “horse blanket,” a giant foldout
schematic diagram of Iran’s nuclear production facilities. Mr. Obama authorized the attacks to continue, and every few weeks —
certainly after a major attack — he would get updates and authorize the
next step. Sometimes it was a strike riskier and bolder than what had
been tried previously.
“From his first days in office, he was deep into every step in slowing the Iranian program…”…a senior administration official said….
But the good luck did not last. In the summer of 2010, shortly after a new variant of the worm had been sent into Natanz, it became clear that the worm, which was never supposed to leave the Natanz machines, had broken free,
like a zoo animal that found the keys to the cage. It fell to Mr.
Panetta and two other crucial players in Olympic Games — General
Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Michael
J. Morell, the deputy director of the C.I.A. — to break the news to Mr.
Obama and Mr. Biden.
An error in the code, they said, had led it to spread to an engineer’s computer when
it was hooked up to the centrifuges. When the engineer left Natanz and
connected the computer to the Internet, the American- and Israeli-made
bug failed to recognize that its environment had changed. It began replicating itself all around the world. Suddenly, the code was exposed, though its intent would not be clear, at least to ordinary computer users.
“We think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” one of the
briefers told the president, “and we don’t know if we were part of that
activity.” [The Pentagon employs more than 27,000 PR specialists with a budget of nearly $5 billion a year. US mobsters would never admit they screwed up, acted prematurely, or the like].
Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of
questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant.
The
answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. “It’s got to be the Israelis,” he said. “They went too far.” [Right, it's got to be the other guy.]
In fact, both the Israelis and the Americans had been aiming for a particular part of the centrifuge plant, a critical area whose loss, they had concluded, would set the Iranians back considerably. It is unclear who introduced the programming error.
The question facing Mr. Obama was whether the rest of Olympic Games [Stuxnet] was in jeopardy, now that a variant of the bug was replicating itself “in the wild,” where computer security experts can dissect it and figure out its purpose.
“I don’t think we have enough information,” Mr. Obama told the group that day, according to the officials. But in the meantime, he ordered that the cyber attacks continue. They were his best hope of disrupting the Iranian nuclear program unless economic sanctions began to bite harder and reduced Iran’s oil revenues.
Within a week, another version of the bug brought down just under 1,000 centrifuges. Olympic Games [Stuxnet] was still on.
American cyber attacks are not limited to Iran, but the focus of attention, as one administration official put it, “has been overwhelmingly on one country.” There is no reason to believe that will remain the case for long. Some
officials question why the same techniques have not been used more
aggressively against North Korea. Others see chances to disrupt Chinese
military plans, forces in Syria on the way to suppress the uprising
there, and Qaeda operations around the world. “We’ve considered a lot
more attacks than we have gone ahead with,” one former intelligence
official said.
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.”
“This article is adapted from “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” [by David E. Sanger of the New York Times] to be published by Crown on Tuesday.”
“A version of this article appears in print on June 1, 2012, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Order Sped Up Wave Of Cyberattacks Against Iran.”
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Added: ‘Obama’s General,’ James Cartwright, admits leaking Stuxnet details to NY Times and Newsweek:
10/17/2016, “‘Obama’s General’ Pleads Guilty to Leaking Stuxnet Operation [to David E. Sanger of the NY Times and Newsweek’s Daniel Klaidman]” Foreign Policy
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Added: In Jan. 2017 Obama pardoned his military insider friend who leaked Stuxnet details to NY Times and Newsweek:
1/17/2017, “Obama Pardons James Cartwright, General Who Lied to F.B.I. in Leak,” NY Times
“President Obama on Tuesday pardoned James E. Cartwright, a retired Marine Corps general and former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his discussions with reporters about [US role in Stuxnet attack on] Iran’s nuclear program, saving him from a possible prison…”…
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