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Stuxnet’s Secret Twin (4,176 words)
by Ralph Langner, Foreign Policy
Pocket

Stuxnet is a pretty nasty nasty customer, especially if you happen to be a centrifuge used in the enrichment of uranium. Amazingly, the story of the first publicly acknowledged cyber weapon keeps getting more and more interesting. Ralph Langner has spent the last several years poring over code and other details of Stuxnet’s history and discovered there was an earlier version of the virus, that was even more destructive than the one unleashed on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Instead of putting the centrifuge’s motors in overdrive, it over pressurized them by closing valves designed to allow gas out. It sounds like a perfectly logical avenue of attack, until you realize that the potential for truly catastrophic failure would have quickly blown Stuxnet’s cover.

Filed under: Misc, Science, Internet

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Much news has broken about Stuxnet, a virus which was credited for sabotaging the Iranian uranium enrichment program, has found its way to the International Space Station, or the ISS for short. It was said that Stuxnet had gone rogue, especially when it has the ability to infect other machines via USB or optical media instead of the usual modus operandi of an Internet connection. Just in case you think that an apocalyptic scenario is about to unfold, fret not – the ISS has not been infected by Stuxnet, and all of the earlier reports have been blown out of proportion due to sensationalism.

Apparently, Kaspersky had never mentioned that Stuxnet had infected the International Space Station, but he did present a couple of separate and unrelated anecdotes. The first of the two was about non-specific malware being carried onboard the space station by astronauts, while the other had something to do with Stuxnet infecting a Russian nuclear-facility network. Kaspersky was cited to have said, “The space guys, from time to time, are coming with USBs, which are infected. I’m not kidding. I was talking to Russian space guys and they said, ‘Yeah, from time to time, there are [computer] viruses on the space station.’”

NASA was also quoted as saying, “Virus was never a threat to any of the computers used for cmd and cntl [command and control] and no adverse effect on ISS Ops [operations].” There you go, right from the horse’s mouth itself, the ISS is safe from any virus infection so you won’t find any rogue satellites causing havoc worldwide.

Stuxnet Did Not Infect The International Space Station (ISS) original content from Ubergizmo.

Kaspersky Labs’ namesake Eugene Kaspersky is worried that widely distributed and potentially state-sponsored malware like Flame and Stuxnet pose dire threats to often lightly protected infrastructure like communication and power plants — whatever your nationality, it’s clearly bad for the civilian population of a given country to suffer even collateral damage from cyberattacks. To minimize future chaos and literally keep the trains running, Kaspersky and his company are expanding their ambitions beyond mere antivirus software to build their own, extra-secure operating system just for large-scale industry. The platform depends on a custom, minimalist core that refuses to run any software that isn’t baked in and has no code outside of its main purposes: there’ll be no water supply shutdowns after the night watch plays Solitaire from an infected drive. Any information shared from one of these systems should be completely trustworthy, Kaspersky says. He doesn’t have details as to when the OS will reach behind-the-scenes hardware, but he stresses that this is definitely not an open-source project: some parts of the OS will always remain confidential to keep ne’er-do-well terrorists (and governments) from undermining the technology we often take for granted.

Filed under: Software

Kaspersky Labs preps its own OS to guard vital industry against cyberwarfare originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Oct 2012 13:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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