Iran Feature: Obama Ordered Cyber-Attacks on Tehran (Sanger)

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.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

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Iran Special: Assessing the Latest Cyber-Threat --- The "Rogue Certificate" (Arseh Sevom)

Suppose you want to send mail to your brother. But an enemy somehow manages to get credentials of a postman and bribes or coerces his way into becoming the postman that takes your mail to your brother and brings his reply back. Now when you put mail in the mailbox, he will discard your mail and instead, write a mail himself and take that to your brother as if you had written it. Then, when your brother writes a reply to your mail, the postman picks that one up, discards it and writes a totally different reply and brings it back to you.

The result is that neither you nor your brother are able to communicate what you wish to communicate to each other if the enemy wishes to alter your message. Worse, even if he doesn’t, any secret that you sent, including your addresses and passwords are now the property of the enemy. Now imagine the government of Iran or another government being that postman, reading every message you send over Google…

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