Did the US write Stuxnet? Deputy Defense Secretary won't deny it | Hacker News Reader

Did the US write Stuxnet? Deputy Defense Secretary won't deny it

nakedsecurity.sophos.com

30 pointszgorgonola11 comments

Of course, a refusal to confirm or deny the US's involvement in the Stuxnet worm isn't an admission. After all, it's possible that Lynn simply doesn't know if the USA was involved - and doesn't want to be caught on film denying something which later turns out to be true.
Or it's possible that he's not authorised to deny the US's involvement for reasons best known to the higher echelons of US politics.

Or maybe even the USA, were involved in Stuxnet but Lynn realises what a monumental sh-t-storm that would create on the international stage so he thought better than to confirm it on a CNBC documentary.

Or maybe Lynn knows the US had nothing to do with it, but admitting that would make it easy to tell when they do have something to hide.

Or maybe Lynn knows the US had nothing to do with it, but admitting that would make it easy to tell when they do have something to hide.

This is indeed a reason that a standard response about national intelligence issues when questions come from journalists is "We neither confirm nor deny that . . . " That does a little, at least, to reduce the signal given to foreign intelligence agencies about the underlying facts by responses to journalists.

Markoff and the NYT talked about Siemens at Idaho National Labs in February, Langner said it out loud at TED and Wikipedia puts it straight on the US and Israel. I'm pretty sure we dropped the question mark a long time ago.

Also, check out this excellent 27C3 presentation from Bruce Dang, a microsoft malware analyst, where he cracks numerous gags about mossad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOwMW6agpTI

It's well worth watching anyway, lots of good info on the various exploits used by stuxnet, down to the opcode level. He's a pretty funny guy as well.

Wikipedia puts it straight on the US and Israel

I agree with your overall conclusion about who wrote Stuxnet, but Wikipedia is not at all a competent source for information on any such issue.

That was one of my favorite parts of Langner's TED talk, he was like "You really want me to go there? Fine, yes I think Mossad was involved, but only the technological superpower in the world could have coordinated this, and that is the US."

If somebody asked me whether I was responsible for one of the most amazing achievements to date in some field of endeavour, I'd think twice before saying "no", too.

Is that why they ask for more money for "cyber warfare"? So they can use it to start cyberwars with other countries? I thought the point was to protect Americans against attacks, not cause them themselves.

While I'm not going to defend this instance ethically, using a computer virus to destroy another country's nuclear capabilities with no loss of life and no obvious blame a year later is pretty impressive. If a "cyber war" means shit breaks so you can't fight and nobody dies, I'm fine with that.

It's an open secret that the US and its allies engage in as much CNA/CNE as they do CND. (Explanations at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_network_operations)

Trying to read an awful lot into a "no comment" kind of answer.

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