This
unusual trick was never even seen before 2008 when someone left a
basket full of free thumb drives in the men's room at CENTCOM
Headquarters in Tampa, Florida.
Predictably, one of the curious
soldiers took a UBS drive and plugged it into his computer at work,
which then launched an infection. To this day, CENTCOM does not know who
did it. It certainly was not t the US Government, which spent a lot of
money trying to figure out whodunit and what they had done to CENTCOM's
vaunted computer security.
I suspect it was the Chinese
Government who attacked CENTCOM in 2008 as a dry run for their 2009
attack on Iran’s computers. Let me explain. In 2008, the UN’s nuclear
inspectors, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) informed the
Chinese Government that Iran was developing a nuclear plant using
Chinese designed equipment. This caused a bit of an uproar.
Now you have to understand that China is run by two different
mafia-like gangs. The Civilian Gang (Communist party bureaucrats) make
their money by stealing western technology, copying it, and then selling
cheaper products back to the west. Eighty five percent of the
non-edible goods at Wal-Mart, including the electronics, are made in
China.
The Military Gang (the People’s Liberation Army or
PLA) runs it own little empire of factories, plants, and industries
that have nothing to do with military defense. The PLA even owns its own
country, North Korea, which the PLA uses as a black market storefront
to sell drugs, guns, missiles, and recently nuclear technology.
The PLA’s gang leaders were perfectly willing to risk world peace
by trading pieces of the Islamic bomb in return for access to Arab and
African oil. When Col. Quadaffi turned his blueprints for nuclear
warheads over to the Americans, the documents were written in Chinese.
The PLA also sold blueprints for a nuclear processing plant to Pakistan.
To China's horror, the enterprising Pakistanis went into the
nuclear black market business for themselves. They renamed the Chinese
centrifuge the Pakistan-1 and began selling the P-1's to Iran.
In
their defense, the PLA explained that the army only sold obsolete
nuclear designs to Pakistan. It was crude and almost unworkable
technology that predated China's signing the Nuclear Non-proliferation
Agreement. It was an extremely flimsy and wholly illegal excuse.
The
Civilian Gang leaders were outraged. If word got out, it would ruin
China's peaceful marketing image, and threaten their underwear sales to
the west.
The US State Department was already banging on Beijing’s door, as a Wikileaks Secret Cable revealed:
"In
March 2009, the U.S. raised with you our concerns that Pakistans
Intralink Incorporated had sought a quote from the Chinese firm Suzhou
Testing Instrument Factory for a vibration test system. Intralink
Incorporated appears to be closely associated with the Project
Management Organization (PMO), the developer of Pakistans Ghaznavi
short-range ballistic missile."
Strangely enough, Julian
Assange never published this particular cable, perhaps part of an
unusual pattern of self-censorship to avoid antagonizing the Chinese
leadership. One internet blogger claims that Assange had over a million
documents provided by the Chinese before he opened Wikileaks.
Whether Assange is a witting or unwitting dupe for Chinese
intelligence, is purely a matter for speculation at this point. It is
interesting, though, that this particular cable that mentions Suzhou
also contains information about China’s illegal deals with Iran.
Instead, a disgruntled Wikileaks employee went behind Assange’s back and
gave a complete set of the Wikileaks cables to a Swedish newspaper,
which promptly released the Suzhou cable without knowing its
significance.
http://www.aftenposten.no/spesial/wikileaksdokumenter/article3988319.ece
The City of Suzhou (formerly Suchow) mentioned in the ballistic
missile deal with Pakistan, was also the same place where the Vacon
company manufactured controllers for Iran’s illegal centrifuges. The
Stuxnet Swiss Army knife was brilliantly and precisely tooled to take
over only the Vacon machines and wreck only the centrifuges in Iran.
Here’s how it was done. American law forbids the export of
certain electronic controllers that run at 600 Hertz or higher because
that is the frequency at which uranium centrifuges spin. The Chinese
made Vacon controllers in fact operate at 800 hertz to 1200 hertz, so
the Stuxnet Swiss Army knife had to be designed to include a sniffer
that searched only for gear that ran at the same frequency as a Vacon
controller.
Since the Vacon was made in a factory in
Suzhou, it was not hard for Chinese to get access to the Vacon parts and
identify its weaknesses. Once identified, the Chinese could speed up
and slow down the Iranian centrifuges and wreck them, while spoofing the
gauges in the Iranian control room into reporting that everything was
normal.
But how to get Stuxnet software past Iranian
security? Once again, the Suzhou scientists had an answer. Suzhou’s
several industrial parks were the Chinese home for many foreign high
tech companies, among them the branch office of RealTik. Apparently,
someone in Suzhou stole Realtik’s genuine authentication password and
added it to the Stuxnet tool roster. That’s more than a coincidence,
that’s three strikes for Suzhou, a city which, it should noted was the
high tech research site of the former nuclear defense ministry of the
PLA.
Why would the Chinese defense industry engage in
nuclear proliferation and then reverse course to sabotage Iran’s nuclear
weapons program when Iran was China’s second largest oil supplier? Oil
is the answer.
China’s number one oil supplier is Saudi
Arabia, and the Saudis allegedly made it very clear to China that if
they continued to help Iran attain a nuclear weapon, not another drop of
Arab oil would ever reach China’s shores. The Chinese already knew that
the Iranian military and navy was almost strong enough to blockade all
oil tankers coming through the narrow Straits of Hormuz, choking off
more than 40% of the world’s oil supply. If Iran went crazy, China would
go dark.
Instead, Saudi Arabia offered China a deal they
could not refuse. The Saudi solution was to ship the oil over land,
rather than by sea. The Saudis (and all the other Gulf States) were
frantically building a network of pipelines to carry their oil to Iraq.
From Iraq, another pipeline ran across Syria to the Mediterranean Sea
where the Russians were building a giant port.
Russia had
a lot of oil to sell, but the problem was their supertankers could not
fit through the Panama canal. It was costing the Russians a fortune to
send their tankers west past Gibraltar, down around the continent of
Africa, and then back up to the Asian oil consumers.
The
Russian solution was Israel. The Israeli government had an existing
unused pipeline that ran from Eilat on the Red Sea up to Ashkelon on the
Mediterranean Coast. The Israelis reversed the flow, and unloaded
Russian tankers at Ashkelon, and piped the oil to the Red Sea, where
other tankers could sail to China without ever sailing near Iran’s
chokepoint.
The Saudi offer to China was simple: China
would get a cut by building the world’s largest oil refinery in Deir as
Zour, Syria, just across the border from the Iraqi pipeline. Whatever
Iran did in the future with the Straits of Hormuz, the Gulf States could
ship China all the oil it would ever need through Syria, which would
then ship it down the coast to Ashkelon and through the Israeli pipeline
to the Red Sea.
It meant that in the long run China
would sell out Iran and have to side with her Arab enemies. China was
agreeable in principal. But first, there was a little problem of
cleaning up the PLA’s nuclear mess. In 2007, Israel bombed a secret
Syrian nuclear plant in Deir as Zour, Syria, wrecking Iran’s plans to
build hundreds of dirty bombs for its proxies to attack Israel.
Surprisingly, the Syrian government praised Israel for their
discretion in handling the raid. Once the Deir as Zour nuclear plant was
rubble, the Chinese government signed the deal to build the world’s
largest oil refinery in Deir as Zour Syria in April 2008.
To finish cleaning up the last part of the PLA’s proliferation mess,
China launched their Stuxnet attack on Iran in June 2009. At first the
Iranians blamed the Jews, but then in the Middle East, everybody blames
the Jews for everything anyway. This time, it seems the Iranians may
have been partly correct.
In order to get the Stuxnet
Swiss army knife into Iran, someone would have to wrap the Chinese
Stuxnet worm inside another software package for infiltration. Experts
have confirmed that this separate software wrap around the Stuxnet
payload was written in a rushed manner by a second group of programmers
who were not the original authors of Stuxnet.
It is very
possible that the Israeli encryption team of Unit 8200 was responsible
for the second software wrap and for the actual delivery. Using the
Realtik safety certification stolen in Suzhou, the Stuxnet virus spread
slowly but surely throughout the civilian sector of Iran, and slowly
infected the government computers without being noticed.
Even when it was eventually discovered (by a Byelorussian company)
Stuxnet was dismissed as a harmless piece of malware that really didn’t
do anything damaging. The reason was that Stuxnet was patiently
searching for the Vacon trigger frequency, and then all hell broke
loose.
By the time the Iranians realized that China was
behind the attack, it was too late. The damage had been done. Many
centrifuges were wrecked outright. Worse the worm seemed to reinfect the
new centrifuges as soon as they were brought online. The embarrassed
Russians then had to tell Tehran that the Stuxnet virus had been found
in the Busher reactor, and that it could not be started for fear of a
meltdown.
Iran ordered a cyber counterattack, not against
Israel or America, but against China. At midnight on January 12, 2010,
the “Iranian Cyber Army” took over China’s biggest internet service,
Baidu, and planted the Iranian flag on their website.
It
was an extreme loss of face for the Chinese leadership. By 11 am,
China’s more formidable cyber Army had repulsed the attack, and Chinese
hackers began to attack Iran, putting the Chinese flag on Iranian
websites, and warning them not to intrude again on China’s cyber turf.
Iran backed down. The first battle of the cyber war was over. China had
won.
Israel didn’t stop fighting. On October 15, 2010,
the Israelis used Stuxnet software to cause three separate explosions
inside Iranian missile facilities. The press reported that virtually the
entire stockpile of Iranian Shehab-3 medium range missiles was
destroyed.
What was not publicly reported was that the
Mossad had timed the blasts to coincide with a visit from Iran’s nuclear
weapons team. Most of them were killed in the blast, but five more
surviving scientists were assassinated over the next month. This time,
Iran blamed Israel instead of China, and they were right.
In an usual postscript, Israel is believed to have shared the Stuxnet
secret with the American government, so the threat is neutralized.
Still, one is left wondering what else the Chinese cyber division has up
its sleeve.
(C) Copyright John Loftus 2011
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=194950
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(January 23, 2011) First of all, America did not invent the Stuxnet
software that recently crippled Iran's uranium enrichment factories.
Stuxnet is the electronic equivalent of a Swiss army knife, each knife contains several different software tools, each of which can turn one specific valve, gauge, or switch on and off.
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