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Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

>Moreover, Stuxnet was so advanced for the time that its existence stunned the world.

Not technically advanced. It was using a collection of 0-day exploits to get into a PC via a USB drive. Any basic hacker could accomplish that with existing exploit tooling.

What was so advanced about it was the coordination to enable it. The collection of 0-day exploits, the knowledge of the architecture of the centrifuge, and the engineering expertise to compromise the centrifuges in a non-obvious way.

Stuxnet was incredibly simple technologically, but it was distilled down to exactly what it needed to do and delivered to just the right people by an advanced vast intelligence apparatus. It did not depend on any breakthroughs in signals, encoding, hardware, etc. I'm not suggesting they aren't capable of technological breakthroughs, but stuxnet definitely isn't an example of one.

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You make it sound much simpler than reality, have you read any of the technical reports or just the latest CNN report? I would highly recommend at least reading the Wikipedia entry for Stuxnet, particularly under "Operation" [0] before brushing it off as a job any script kiddie with access to zero-days could accomplish.... never mind that using four zero-days is "unprecedented". Also you are ignoring the fact that they just didn't hack Windows, but also a number of very specific Siemens custom software packages and PLCs. All technical analysis of Stuxnet that I have read until now have said it could only be a government actor with enough resources and time to build something of this magnitude, targeted so specifically as to only affect centrifuges in Iran, although it was discovered in various countries. If you need more technical details, Symantic wrote up a ~60 page dossier with lots more technical details[1]. You would be surprised how insanely detailed this thing is.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Operation

[1]: https://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/secu...

I am completely aware of how it worked and you seem to have ignored what I said. The organizational effort to collect the 0 days, target the right centrifuges, etc is what was impressive but there was nothing new technological there. Putting together multiple 0 days is how hackers win sandbox busting competitions for browsers.

Stuxnet has been analyzed in detail and there were no new special hacking techniques like unknown ASLR vulnerabilities or arbitrary unprivileged memory reads like spectre. It was just some 0-days wrapped up with a laser focused task that took years of effort to research.

It's shockingly impressive how much effort went into researching what needed to be done, not the actual mechanism thag was used to do it.

If someone plans out a super elaborate assassination of the hardest target in the world and completes it with a homemade shiv, you don't comment on how impressive the shiv itself was. It was the ability to know when/where/how that was impressive.

Yeah, if Stuxnet had been using something like Spectre or Meltdown the world really would have exploded. And without the source/whitepaper I'm not sure people would have even figured out what it was doing for quite a while.

They say Stuxnet featured nothing very new or technological but I don’t recall anything else infecting PLC’s and using ambient temperature sensors to define behavior. That is just one techno. aspect I found original. The fact that this wasn’t anything new to Symantec researchers is kinda frightening of itself.

>but I don’t recall anything else infecting PLC’s and using ambient temperature sensors to define behavior. That is just one techno. aspect I found original.

The target was interesting and the attack subtle, but attacks on industrial control systems had been the target of research even in the public in the same time frame: http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/09/26/power.at.risk/

You didn't even read the post you're responding to, you're just repeating what they said.

>I'm not suggesting they aren't capable of technological breakthroughs, but stuxnet definitely isn't an example of one.

Never suggested it was. My point still stands that the world was shocked it existed, if only for precisely the reasons you described. It was an indicator of the degree to which intelligence agencies had their shit together at the time. Things that advanced had never really been publicly seen nor pulled off before.

As an aside, one can likewise argue that imaging people via RF isn't really a breakthrough unto itself, but merely putting existing technology and knowledge together in a complicated but exacting fashion.

But it wasn't advanced technologically though. Any blackhat with a stash of 0 days and instructions from the right plc engineer could have put together the payload to do this.

When it comes to seeing through walls, these are new techniques. It's not about knowing the right target through intelligence gathering, etc. It requires new state of the art methods not already available to the public.

hmm, what holds more informational value - thousands of articles and detailed analysis from experts all over the world, or one presumably disgruntled anonymous user on public internet forum that keeps repeating itself?

There are not thousands of articles saying that it was a technological breakthrough. Most sophisticated doesn't mean a new technique was used, etc.

> presumably disgruntled anonymous user

I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm not disgruntled at all. I'm pointing out that it was not a technological breakthrough in any regard so it's wrong to identify it as one.

If someone unexpectedly accumulates the largest amount of gold in the world, it's impressive, but it's not a breakthrough in gold-mining technology.

The truth is not a vote.

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