Stuxnet Drama!

[bobthedinosaur]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g0pi4J8auQ&sns=fb
I've been reading about it for awhile now, but I didn't know how it was so accessible for others to use. Kind of scary with the reverse engineering potential.

[knorke]

stuxnet is not open source.
if it was, that would probally be better because then security flaws it exploits would be easier to fix.

[dansan]

stuxnet is not open source.
if it was, that it would probally be better because then security flaws it exploits would be easier to be fixed.

[dansan]

I could never decide which I find more scary: weapons being only accessible to armies or to civilians.

My political reasoning: armies don't only fight armies, but a main role is to be the ultimate ruler over their civilian population. So in a "revolutionary way" I feel, that "the people" should also have a right to arm themselves.

On the other hand I am really afraid of the common mob. Having the german population armed scars the shit out of me.

While the USA is also a good example why having armed civilians is really dangerous (high death toll due to hand fire arms), nobody will deny that armies have killed far more civilians than civilians have!

Anyway: Stuxnet was probably developed by some government agency. What did it do? It infiltrated another governments facility and sabotaged it. This is what agents do - it is so much James Bond :)

Being a Linux user I'm personally not really afraid of viruses, but one thing I have read recently I find really scary: they managed to create a virus that runs in the firmware of a network card! It can quietly scan all your traffic, it's OS independent, and it can send data to someone else without you noticing it. Your personal firewall won't help, and an anti-virus doesn't scan the firmware of your network card.

(Ofc you should always encrypt all your traffic, but springrts.com doesn't support it

[AF]

Its source code is more decompilation than pilfered originals from what a quick google says

[knorke]

so much for informations from "news" videos with flashy graphics.

Anyway, even if this was easily downloadable, what would happen?
It would not be a "weapon to the people", like ie the guns in the US.
It would be a bunch of random numbers and funny words and as harmfull as the code of anti_comnap.lua
People would not even know how to ie open the valves of a power plant to make it explode if they were standing in front of the controll panel.

I guess even for the average hacker it would be of little use.
So how much of a "revolutionary weapon" is it if can only be used by some specialised organisations and the normal people dont have a clue what is going on?

[dansan]

I guess even for the average hacker it would be of little use.
So how much of a "revolutionary weapon" is it if can only be used by some specialised organisations and the normal people dont have a clue what is going on?

My thoughts about weapons accessibility were meant general, not specific to this.

But about this: in your everyday revolution "normal people" don't make most decisions. It's done by people that have prepared/trained for it. Those people would look for someone that can use a needed weapon. ("Normal people" cannot even use a tank, I guess.)

There are two parts to Stuxnet: the "transport layer" of the Trojan and the "payload". It is the current payload that is not "for your average hacker" (you need a nuclear reactor to test drive your code), but that can be replaced by something else. Digital machine controls are common nowadays.

[MidKnight]

...And that's why you don't connect nuclear plant controls to the internet.

Stuxnet is nothing special. It's your run of the mill virus with a bunch of safeguards aimed at a very high-profile target.

What's scary is the idea of governments using malicious software as a weapon. It's very easy for a technology this powerful to turn into a tool for oppression.

[AF]

Dont underestimate the power of anti_comnap.lua

[Teutooni]

...And that's why you don't connect nuclear plant controls to the internet.

Ofc you don't, iirc the virus spread via usb stick.

Anyway, if it is really open sauce, where's the source? What's the KLOC?

[yuritch]

I've also read that stuxnet spread via USB sticks, so not connecting your system to the net won't suffice. You'll also have to disallow idiots access to nuclear plants, which seems to be a considerably harder task (why they needed to bring USB sticks to such a facility anyway?)

[PicassoCT]

Baah, USB Sticky is for nubs. Just social haxxor it.. smoke some cigarrets with the it personal, baaw along how bad the people upstairs treat you. Have them give you wifi keys. Best of it all? Once the thing gets hacked, and the evidence points torwards the IT-Crowd for handing out cryptkeys.. whos gonna collect that evidence? Who? ^^^

So suddenly, the evidence is all gone, pointing towards the asshats in marketing who always plug there i-pods in at work?

Like to see them update securoity on the firmware that is human brain...

[hoijui]

indeed...

in hollywood movies, you need a team of the 2nd best hackers in the world, and the 2nd best use-wepaons-guys in the world, to be able to infiltrate a nuclear power plant, just to be defeated by the #1's.

in real live, Humor Simpson works in nucular plant, and when he gets too fat, nucular plant gets connected to the internet so he can access it from home, because it is in the land of the free, where you can be as stupid and fat as can be, and still are free to run nucular plant.
when hacker gets in control of nucular plant (Maggie Simpson accidentally falling on the keyboard), nucular plant has actually a chance to be run safely.

[Gota]

This is way beyond regular hacking...There is zero chance some hackers will start turning off nuclear power plants...

Maybe Stuxnet can be modified to do other things and its complx structure redesigned for other more mundane tasks like infiltrating computers connected to the net...
a Regular virus's goals with a much more compex structure...

[dansan]

What (also) makes Stuxnet special is its ability to identify its "location", so it drops its payload only at the right target.

In "war terms" I'd say if you infect millions of computers only to get into two specific machines, then you have a high collateral damage. Luckily that damage in RL is rather low.

[HeavyLancer]

in real live, Humor Simpson works in nucular plant, and when he gets too fat, nucular plant gets connected to the internet so he can access it from home, because it is in the land of the free, where you can be as stupid and fat as can be, ans still are free to run nucular plant.
when hacker gets in control of nucular plant (Maggie Simpson accidentally falling on the keyboard), nucular plant has actually a change to be run safely.

So an animated TV show is real life?

In real life, what happens is that Windows computers happen to be connected to SCADA machines on a network, so that they can control them.
A USB key carried from the outside world (infected by Stuxnet or similar) gets put into a machine without it being sanitised first. Shenanigans ensue. Simple as that.

Of course, if this was in any Western country they wouldn't have had to craft such weaponised malware. Social engineering is much more effective - you could just bribe/threaten an engineer to put a malicious program on the SCADA machines.

[Teutooni]

In "war terms" I'd say if you infect millions of computers only to get into two specific machines, then you have a high collateral damage. Luckily that damage in RL is rather low.

That's precisely what stuxnet did. It infected millions of machines worldwide to finally sneak into closed nuclear facility controllers, identify them as Bushehr and Natanz, and activate.

[PicassoCT]

Somewhere out there, there is a viruz with your name on it.

I wonder who this Stux was, guess he worked in that iranian powerplant. Poor Stux, gets all the blame, all the time.

Also Heavy Lancer: Its always a sign of people working only with "intelligent" people, asuming that stupidity doesent exist (as shown in the early simpsons series before it ended in slapstick). Now if you doubt that such stupidity exists, how about entering a "security releavant" local facility and searching for non-int- life there. You will be suprised what can be found. Now get adventurin, time for you to be reintroduced to that part of humankind, that one day dropped out of school.

[HeavyLancer]

Also Heavy Lancer: Its always a sign of people working only with "intelligent" people, asuming that stupidity doesent exist (as shown in the early simpsons series before it ended in slapstick). Now if you doubt that such stupidity exists, how about entering a "security releavant" local facility and searching for non-int- life there.

you could just bribe/threaten an engineer to put a malicious program on the SCADA machines.

>Implying that stupid people can't be bribed to do something they don't understand
>Implying that stupid people go to the cops if they get threatened/blackmailed

[PicassoCT]

intelligent people pay attention when the facilitys scecurity guy makes his yearly "Pat attention!" speach.