[LINK] US admits to creating stuxnet

[Kim Holburn]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

> Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

> WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

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http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/06/stuxnet-admission-likely-to-have-foreign-policy-consequences/

> Stuxnet admission likely to have foreign policy consequences
> 
> Iran watchers remain concerned that a domestic political gambit may backfire.


> Given the unofficial confirmation Friday that the United States was behind Stuxnet—the malware designed to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program—political and technical experts suggest that this may effectively put the United States in a more dangerous foreign policy position.
> "This is the end of plausible deniability on Stuxnet," said Chris Bronk, a former State Department official, who is now a research fellow at Rice University. "Cyber is a dangerous place to play. This makes me very nervous that we don’t understand the entire set of consequences of releasing malware into the wild."
> 
> In other words, he told Ars, it sets a potentially dangerous precedent for other countries looking to develop or expand their own clandestine operations.
> 
> "Countries realize that cyber espionage is a heck of a lot easier than anything else," he said. "Now the question is: to what degree [will we have] malware that is designed to impact the physical world? When is that going to become a more widely utilized capability?"

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> Another problem with admitting to being behind Stuxnet is that experts say it may damage the oft-touted "21st Century Statecraft" and "Internet Freedom" agenda that the United States Department of State has been promoting in recent years.
> 
> "I think this undercuts the Internet Freedom agenda in a big way," Bronk, the former State Department official, added. "[It shows that the US] is willing to use the digital agora as a weapon whenever we need to. I think that’s playing both sides of the fence."



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Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
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