Stuxnet worked. Very well. It was out in the wild, by best estimates, for over two years before it was detected.
How long it was out in the wild doesn't matter though: what matters is how long it infected the target machines.
During that time it caused complete chaos within the Iranian nuclear program (to the point where some officials were executed on the suspicion of espionage).
How do we know that the people being executed were innocent as opposed to people committing espionage? I mean, if Stuxnet caused Iranian counterintelligence to discover an Israeli operative, then I'm not sure that's a win: delaying the program by an unspecified amount of time at the cost of lots of dollars and the loss of some operatives doesn't seem like a win to me. But this is all very speculative, so who knows.
Is there a good source justifying the "complete chaos" claim? Or the executions?
"I mean, if Stuxnet caused Iranian counterintelligence to discover an Israeli operative, then I'm not sure that's a win"
I should have clarified. The Iranians, according to reports, resorted to firing, jailing and executing their own scientists and engineers because they couldn't figure out why the operation was going so wrong.
Apparently they replaced all equipment, re-programmed the centrifuges etc. etc. until they thought they eliminated everything except for the actual people involved - at which point they became paranoid and the firing, jailing, executions started.
Here are some of the links I bookmarked, I didn't grab them all but as I find them in my history I will paste them here.
"“Intelligence sources report information reaching the West in the past week that Iran has put to death a number of atomic scientists and technicians suspected of helping plant the Stuxnet virus in its nuclear program.”
Note it says 'suspected', another source I recall was more firm on the employees not being involved (they innocently helped spread the virus through USB disks etc.) but the level of paranoia in Iran was so high that they needed a scapegoat.
This all started with the centrifuges wearing out, having to be replaced, debugged etc. and uranium production being set back by years. Two good sources on this aspect:
Comments
Stuxnet worked. Very well. It was out in the wild, by best estimates, for over two years before it was detected.
How long it was out in the wild doesn't matter though: what matters is how long it infected the target machines.
During that time it caused complete chaos within the Iranian nuclear program (to the point where some officials were executed on the suspicion of espionage).
How do we know that the people being executed were innocent as opposed to people committing espionage? I mean, if Stuxnet caused Iranian counterintelligence to discover an Israeli operative, then I'm not sure that's a win: delaying the program by an unspecified amount of time at the cost of lots of dollars and the loss of some operatives doesn't seem like a win to me. But this is all very speculative, so who knows.
Is there a good source justifying the "complete chaos" claim? Or the executions?
"I mean, if Stuxnet caused Iranian counterintelligence to discover an Israeli operative, then I'm not sure that's a win"
I should have clarified. The Iranians, according to reports, resorted to firing, jailing and executing their own scientists and engineers because they couldn't figure out why the operation was going so wrong.
Apparently they replaced all equipment, re-programmed the centrifuges etc. etc. until they thought they eliminated everything except for the actual people involved - at which point they became paranoid and the firing, jailing, executions started.
Where are these reports? I haven't seen them in any of the more, ah, reputable media, but I may have missed them.
Here are some of the links I bookmarked, I didn't grab them all but as I find them in my history I will paste them here.
"“Intelligence sources report information reaching the West in the past week that Iran has put to death a number of atomic scientists and technicians suspected of helping plant the Stuxnet virus in its nuclear program.”
http://www.securityweek.com/did-iran-execute-nuclear-facilit...
Note it says 'suspected', another source I recall was more firm on the employees not being involved (they innocently helped spread the virus through USB disks etc.) but the level of paranoia in Iran was so high that they needed a scapegoat.
This all started with the centrifuges wearing out, having to be replaced, debugged etc. and uranium production being set back by years. Two good sources on this aspect:
* http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/nw_20101123_2990.p...
* http://www.haaretz.com/news/international/iran-pauses-uraniu...