Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion

"Several groups of Iranian hackers, some of them alleged to have ties to the intelligence ministry, have been attacking opposition Web sites. "

my vote is this was an inside job....
never underestimate the Iranian people & their deep desire NOT to be 'glassed' by a raging-insane dictator.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hykSEo5_nNk

i have to say i suspect the isrealis are behind it. I just don't think Obambi would do anything like it. Of course that is assuming that it isn't really a freelancer.

As for whether this would challenge the bigotry remember that a common anti-semitic trope is that the jews are the conniving controllers of the planet. Very often anti-semitism is really a form of jealousy.

side issue, btw, is that an excellent comment from several years ago argued that america was becoming the "jews" of the planet. they assert a responsibility to us for everything wrong, they believe our tentacles reach everywhere, they are jealous of our success and modernity. interesting insight.

The thought that Israel is behind this is so badass. It sounds like one of the most cunning and modern attacks ever, something you hear about only in movies. It's probably untraceable though but since they aren't killing anybody it will be difficult for the usual suspects to demagogue this one.

@A.W. about America being the "Jew of the planet." I think you're right. I would say that if America wasn't as big and powerful as it is we would be getting a lot more flack. The trouble for the parts of the world that are annoyed or mad at us is we are many of their meal tickets. If you piss off America too badly you might find yourself impoverished. One of the reasons Israel gets so much flack in my opinion is they are so small most are not affected by their existence too greatly. So Israel gets the brunt of the flack because their's no real consequences for those throwing stones.

More than one way to fight a terrorist state apparently. Good.

Heavens...whomever did this should get a medal..cyberwarfare is the war of the future...alot better than blowing up a nuclear plant, just shut it down sounds ok to me.

The only way this could get better is if we were to learn that the virus gained entry because a mullah inside access downloaded porn.

THIS is what "War without boundaries" looks like Mr. dinner jacket.

Go commenters! Inside hacker job, mullahs and downloaded porn add up to ultimate credibility. The best part: they brought it all on themselves.

this virus apparently gains initial entry from a flash memory stick.
remember that the government of Iran is extremely unpopular among young people and technically trained people. It is widely believed to have stolen the last election, and has put down massive peaceful protests by brute force laced with horrible details.
many computer wise young people in Iran are capable of creating and modifying these viruses and have the motivation to do anything non-violent to thwart the government.
They are the only ones who have access to internal computers to plug in the memory sticks. They are very probably the source of these viruses.

i would ask a simple question thought. how badly would this REALLY hurt their efforts to go nuclear?

I mean in WWII we did have computers, but they were very primitive, and i don't think they were at all used in the nuclear program. i mean even if computers were necessary to build nukes, i am pretty sure the average calculator can literally do everything those WWII era computers could.

so how far would this really set them back?

(for those who don't know this, it is a popular myth that computers were first invented for the space program. they were actually first invented during WWII to break codes--which, when you think about it, makes alot more sense. The true history of computers was supressed for a while because of some concern for national security that somehow extended well beyond when computers were commonly known of. i mean i was taught the false stories in the 1980's which doesn't seem justified by national security, but oh well.)

i mean to add a little more to my point... remember the y2k bug. remember the hyseria over that. omg, elevators will suddenly plummet. planes will fall out of the sky. it will be armagedden! We will be reduced to a real life version of fallout 3!

And then it turned out to be a big nothing. i mean some of that was programming updates, but more than a few news sources pointed out that our lives were not nearly that well automated to cause all the disasters we feared. for the same reason, how much can a virus or worm really do?

I worked on some of that y2k remediation. A lot of people did a great job against a hard deadline. They will never be appreciated for what didn't happen.

We must hope that Stuxnet does not mutate (or be genetically reengineered) to attack Western computers.

What keeps it targeted at Iran's computers only? Is it looking for "Microsoft Windows" or "Nuclear Control Module" in Persian?

Actually ENIAC the first American computer did do work for the Manhattan Project. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC see the section on programming

Priority for digital electronic computers goes to COLOSSUS which was used to break the LORENZ cipher http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/lorenz/colossus.htm