President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran
toured the Natanz plant in 2008.
The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is
famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s
never-acknowledged nuclear arms program,
where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for
the arsenal.
Over the past two years, according to intelligence
and military experts familiar with its operations,
Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role
— as a critical testing ground in a joint American
and Israeli effort to undermine Iran’s efforts to
make a bomb of its own.
Behind Dimona’s barbed wire, the experts say,
Israel has spun nuclear centrifuges virtually
identical to Iran ’s at Natanz, where Iranian
scientists are struggling to enrich uranium. They
say Dimona tested the effectiveness of the
Stuxnet computer worm, a destructive program
that appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of
Iran ’s nuclear centrifuges and helped delay,
though not destroy, Tehran’s ability to make its
first nuclear arms.
“To check out the worm, you have to know the
machines,” said an American expert on nuclear
intelligence. “The reason the worm has been
effective is that the Israelis tried it out.”
Though American and Israeli officials refuse to
talk publicly about what goes on at Dimona, the
operations there, as well as related efforts in the
United States, are among the newest and
strongest clues suggesting that the virus was
designed as an American-Israeli project to
sabotage the Iranian program.
In recent days, the retiring chief of Israel’s Mossad
intelligence agency, Meir Dagan, and Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton separately
announced that they believed Iran’s efforts had
been set back by several years. Mrs. Clinton cited
American-led sanctions, which have hurt Iran ’s
ability to buy components and do business
around the world.
The gruff Mr. Dagan, whose organization has
been accused by Iran of being behind the deaths
of several Iranian scientists, told the Israeli
Knesset in recent days that Iran had run into
technological difficulties that could delay a bomb
until 2015. That represented a sharp reversal from
Israel’s long-held argument that Iran was on the
cusp of success.
The biggest single factor in putting time on the
nuclear clock appears to be Stuxnet, the most
sophisticated cyberweapon ever deployed.
In interviews over the past three months in the
United States and Europe, experts who have
picked apart the computer worm describe it as
far more complex — and ingenious — than
anything they had imagined when it began
circulating around the world, unexplained, in
mid-2009.
Many mysteries remain, chief among them,
exactly who constructed a computer worm that
appears to have several authors on several
continents. But the digital trail is littered with
intriguing bits of evidence.
In early 2008 the German company Siemens
cooperated with one of the United States ’ premier
national laboratories, in Idaho, to identify the
vulnerabilities of computer controllers that the
company sells to operate industrial machinery
around the world — and that American
intelligence agencies have identified as key
equipment in Iran ’s enrichment facilities.
Seimens says that program was part of routine
efforts to secure its products against
cyberattacks. Nonetheless, it gave the Idaho
National Laboratory — which is part of the Energy
Department, responsible for America’s nuclear
arms — the chance to identify well-hidden holes
in the Siemens systems that were exploited the
next year by Stuxnet.
The worm itself now appears to have included
two major components. One was designed to
send Iran ’s nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly
out of control. Another seems right out of the
movies: The computer program also secretly
recorded what normal operations at the nuclear
plant looked like, then played those readings back
to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security
tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that
everything was operating normally while the
centrifuges were actually tearing themselves
apart.
The attacks were not fully successful: Some parts
of Iran ’s operations ground to a halt, while others
survived, according to the reports of international
nuclear inspectors. Nor is it clear the attacks are
over: Some experts who have examined the code
believe it contains the seeds for yet more
versions and assaults.
“It’s like a playbook,” said Ralph Langner, an
independent computer security expert in
Hamburg, Germany, who was among the first to
decode Stuxnet. “Anyone who looks at it carefully
can build something like it.” Mr. Langner is
among the experts who expressed fear that the
attack had legitimized a new form of industrial
warfare, one to which the United States is also
highly vulnerable.
Officially, neither American nor Israeli officials will
even utter the name of the malicious computer
program, much less describe any role in
designing it.
Source: Http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html?_r=1
0 comments:
Post a Comment