With Stuxnet, Did The U.S. And Israel Create a New Cyberwar Era? | Danger Room | Wired.com
The Stuxnet whodunit may be solved: it appears to be a joint U.S.-Israeli collaboration — and a cyberwarfare milestone.
The New York Times doesn’t have definitive proof, but it has fascinating circumstantial evidence, and Threat Level’s Kim Zetter will publish more on Tuesday. In 2008, Siemens informed a major Energy Department laboratory of the weaknesses in its SCADA systems. Around that time, the heart of Israel’s nuclear-weapons complex, Dimona, began experimenting on an industrial-sabotage protocol based on a model of the Iranian enrichment program. The Obama administration embraced an initiative begun by the Bush administration to “bore into [Iranian] computers” and disable the nuclear effort. Motive, meet opportunity. By late 2009, Stuxnet was popping up globally, including in Iran.
Iran denies that Stuxnet did any major damage to its nuclear program. But last week, the outgoing chief of Israel’s Mossad spy agency publicly asserted that Iran wouldn’t be capable of making a bomb before 2015, adding four years to a fearsome nuclear schedule. It’s possible that’s just ass-covering spin: for years, both Israel and the U.S. have repeatedly pushed back their estimates of when Iran would go nuclear. But both countries also have long track records of covertly sabotaging Iranian nuke efforts, whether it’s getting scientists to defect or… other means. (Some scientists are getting killed in the streets by unknown assailants.) Stuxnet would be a new achievement for a long-running mission.
And what an achievement. The early stages of cyberwar have looked like a component effort in a broader campaign, as when Georgia’s government websites mysteriously went offline during its 2008 shooting war with Russia. The Navy’s information chief recently suggested that jamming capabilities will be increasingly important to Chinese military doctrine. The difference between that and Stuxnet is the difference between keying someone’s car and blowing up her city.
With Stuxnet, there’s no broader conventional assault, but an adversary’s most important military asset gets compromised. The mission of an aerial bombardment of Iran would be to set Iran’s nuclear program back; to at least some degree, Stuxnet has done precisely that. Only Stuxnet didn’t kill anyone, and it didn’t set off the destabilizing effect in the region that a bombing campaign was likely to reap.
In other words, Stuxnet may represent the so-called “high end” of cyberwarfare: a stealthy, stand-alone capability to knock an opponent’s Queen off the board before more traditional military hostilities can kick in. It wouldn’t be taking out a particular ship’s radar system or even a command-and-control satellite. All of that could still happen. But this would be the first instance of cyberwarfare aimed at a truly strategic target.
That’s not to say we’re there yet, since we don’t really know how many years of a non-nuclear Iran Stuxnet provided. But it is to say that we may be getting there. North Korea’s uranium enrichment efforts have similar industrial control mechanisms, and if Stuxnet couldn’t take them down, a son-of-Stuxnet might. And just consider what kinds of other major cyberwar programs are out there — the ones really hidden in secrecy, not like the winks-and-nods that U.S. and Israeli officials have given to their possible authorship of Stuxnet.
