Richard Clarke Says Stuxnet was a U.S. Operation

Richard Clarke Says Stuxnet was a U.S. Operation

By Jack Goldsmith - Thursday, March 29, 2012 at 4:36 AM

The former counterterrorism czar reaches this conclusion because the operation had lawyers’ fingerprints on it.  From an interview with Ron Rosenbaum in Smithsonian Magazine:

“I think it’s pretty clear that the United States government did the Stuxnet attack,” [Clarke] said calmly.

This is a fairly astonishing statement from someone in his position.

“Alone or with Israel?” I asked.

“I think there was some minor Israeli role in it.  Israel might have provided a test bed, for example.  But I think that the U.S. government did the attack and I think that the attack proved what I was saying in the book [which came out before the attack was known], which is that you can cause real devices—real hardware in the world, in real space, not cyberspace—to blow up.”

Isn’t Clarke coming right out and saying we committed an act of undeclared war?

“If we went in with a drone and knocked out a thousand centrifuges, that’s an act of war,” I said. “But if we go in with Stuxnet and knock out a thousand centrifuges, what’s that?”

“Well,” Clarke replied evenly, “it’s a covert action. And the U.S. government has, ever since the end of World War II, before then, engaged in covert action. If the United States government did Stuxnet, it was under a covert action, I think, issued by the president under his powers under the Intelligence Act. Now when is an act of war an act of war and when is it a covert action?

“That’s a legal issue. In U.S. law, it’s a covert action when the president says it’s a covert action. I think if you’re on the receiving end of the covert action, it’s an act of war.”

When I e-mailed the White House for comment, I received this reply: “You are probably aware that we don’t comment on classified intelligence matters.” Not a denial. But certainly not a confirmation. So what does Clarke base his conclusion on?

One reason to believe the Stuxnet attack was made in the USA, Clarke says, “was that it very much had the feel to it of having been written by or governed by a team of Washington lawyers.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

“Well, first of all, I’ve sat through a lot of meetings with Washington [government/Pentagon/CIA/NSA-type] lawyers going over covert action proposals. And I know what lawyers do.

“The lawyers want to make sure that they very much limit the effects of the action. So that there’s no collateral damage.” He is referring to legal concerns about the Law of Armed Conflict, an international code designed to minimize civilian casualties that U.S. government lawyers seek to follow in most cases.

Clarke illustrates by walking me through the way Stuxnet took down the Iranian centrifuges.

“What does this incredible Stuxnet thing do? As soon as it gets into the network and wakes up, it verifies it’s in the right network by saying, ‘Am I in a network that’s running a SCADA [Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition] software control system?’ ‘Yes.’ Second question: ‘Is it running Siemens [the German manufacturer of the Iranian plant controls]?’ ‘Yes.’ Third question: ‘Is it running Siemens 7 [a genre of software control package]?’ ‘Yes.’ Fourth question: ‘Is this software contacting an electrical motor made by one of two companies?’” He pauses.

“Well, if the answer to that was ‘yes,’ there was only one place it could be. Natanz.”

“There are reports that it’s gotten loose, though,” I said, reports of Stuxnet worms showing up all over the cyberworld. To which Clarke has a fascinating answer:

“It got loose because there was a mistake,” he says. “It’s clear to me that lawyers went over it and gave it what’s called, in the IT business, a TTL.”

“What’s that?”

“If you saw Blade Runner [in which artificial intelligence androids were given a limited life span—a “time to die”], it’s a ‘Time to Live.’” Do the job, commit suicide and disappear. No more damage, collateral or otherwise.

“So there was a?TTL built into Stuxnet,” he says [to avoid violating international law against collateral damage, say to the Iranian electrical grid]. And somehow it didn’t work.”

About the Author
Jack Goldsmith is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor at Harvard Law School, where he teaches and writes about national security law, presidential power, cybersecurity, international law, internet law, foreign relations law, and conflict of laws. Before coming to Harvard, Professor Goldsmith served as Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel from 2003–2004, and Special Counsel to the Department of Defense from 2002–2003.

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Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA)

If you download and distribute copyrighted material on the Internet, or share any information that governments or corporations find inconvenient, you could soon be labeled a threat to national security in the United States. That’s the aim of a bill in Congress called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA).

The good news is that SOPA and PIPA haven’t come to pass, but the bad news is that they could be followed by a bill that is even more invasive and could violate even more of your civil liberties. According to a press release issued last week, the bill already has over a 100 congressional co-sponsors. Yet the bill is only now beginning to appear on the public radar.

CISPA would let companies spy on users and share private information with the federal government and other companies with near-total immunity from civil and criminal liability. It effectively creates a ‘cybersecurity’ exemption to all existing laws.

CISPA, however, is nothing like SOPA, despite its recent association in the media. While SOPA included provisions that would have essentially broken the Internet by allowing the U.S. to delete domains from a central registry system, CISPA does nothing of the sort, and aims more at “cyber threat intelligence” gathering than censorship and piracy prevention.

The bill presents itself as a simple enhancement of America’s cyber-security that would amend the National Security Act to include “cyber threat intelligence” gathering. To those ends, it would tear down the firewall between private corporate networks and the National Security Agency , enabling corporations to share data with the world’s most sophisticated spy apparatus.

While the bill is openly supported by companies like AT&T, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Facebook, Boeing and Intel, ACLU legislative counsel Michelle Richardson cautioned last month that it is not something to be taken up lightly.

Cybercrime claimed 431 million adult victims last year and cost $114 billion

Cybercrime claimed 431 million adult victims last year and cost $114 billion, according to a report published Wednesday.

The Norton Cybercrime Report 2011 said over 74 million people in the United States were cybercrime victims last year, suffering $32 billion in direct financial losses.

Cybercrime cost China around $25 billion, Brazil $15 billion and India $4 billion in the past 12 months, said the report from computer security firm Symantec, maker of the Norton anti-virus software.

According to the report, more than two-thirds of online adults -- 69 percent -- have been victims of cybercrime at some point in their lives, resulting in more than one million cybercrime victims a day.

Cybercrime rates were even higher in China and South Africa. Eighty-five percent of Chinese respondents to the Norton survey and 84 percent of South Africans said they have been victims of cybercrime.

The report found a growing threat from cybercrime on mobile phones.

Ten percent of adults online have experienced cybercrime on their mobile phones and the number of reported new mobile operating system vulnerabilities increased from 115 in 2009 to 163 in 2010.

"There is a serious disconnect in how people view the threat of cybercrime," said Adam Palmer, Norton lead cybersecurity advisor. "Cybercrime is much more prevalent than people realize.

"Over the past 12 months, three times as many adults surveyed have suffered from online crime versus offline crime, yet less than a third of respondents think they are more likely to become a victim of cybercrime than physical world crime in the next year," Palmer said.

For the survey, interviews were conducted with nearly 20,000 people in 24 countries, Symantec said.

Spear Phishing

By now most everyone has heard the term “phishing”.

Wikipedia defines phishing as an attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.

Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT administrators are commonly used to lure the unsuspecting public.

Phishing is typically carried out by e-mail spoofing or instant messaging, and it often directs users to enter details at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one.

Phishing is an example of social engineering techniques used to deceive users, and exploits the poor usability of current web security technologies.

IDP recently carried out an authorized phishing attack for one of its customers and found that over 50% of the staff gave up their email passwords in an email that, if examined closely, was obviously bogus.

So what is spear phishing?

The difference between phishing and spear phishing is while the former floods thousands or even millions of inboxes, the latter targets a small group of previously-identified people, sometimes only a handful who work at the same company or in the same organization.

With the increased popularity of social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), the bad guys are now able to select specific individuals (and businesses) and direct their malicious activity in a very granular fashion, just as you’d spear a fish.

"Today's spear phishing is not only more prevalent but also much more technically proficient," say Dave Jevans, chairman of the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), an industry association dedicated to fighting online identity theft.

"They're not going for a password, anymore, they're getting people to install crimeware on their computers," said Jevans.

Like the more common phishing, spear phishing attacks are launched as emails that try to con the recipient into clicking a link that leads to a malicious Web site. Those sites can take almost infinite forms, from fake account log-in screens to ones that tout a software upgrade to widely-used software, such as Adobe Flash.

Once the malicious link or email is clicked the attacker is able to install a program that infects the computer, giving criminals access to that machine -- and through it, others -- or to confidential information, like account passwords obtained by secretly monitoring the PC's keystrokes.

According to reports by the likes of Bloomberg, the recent IMF spear-phishing attack targeted one of its workers and planted malware on a machine, which was then presumably used to scout the network for data to steal.

But the IMF incident is only the most recent in a series of specialized attacks this year aimed at targets from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the French foreign ministry to Google's Gmail.

All have one thing in common: They relied on spear phishing to fool users into installing malware or revealing account information.

So what can individuals you do?

Well, very simply, maintain awareness, think before you click, keep your antivirus and antimalware software up to date and remember that anyone can be an unwitting target.

What about businesses?

Educating staff is first and foremost. Make sure there are polices, processes and procedures in place that everyone follows – but more importantly, that they understand.

From a technical perspective, ensure that your perimeter defenses (stateful firewalls, IDS / IPS, VPNs, blacklists, access control, etc.) are current, properly configured, monitored and regularly tested.

In summary, maintaining a defensive posture is not rocket science. Common sense, diligence and thoughtfulness is 90% of the game.

Defending Against Insider Threats To Reduce Your Risk

Insider threats are often overlooked when it comes to information security, but in fact insider threats account for the large majority of information theft and compromised systems. Who better to leverage their access and knowledge than those who often times have the keys to the kingdom.

I read a good white paper this morning by CA Technologies (ca.com) entitled Defending Against Insider Threats To Reduce Your Risk. You can read an excerpt here:

http://www.idpnow.net/documents/Defending_Against_Insider_Threats.pdf

The focus of the article is that insider threats are increasing. The 2009 e-Crime Watch surveyed 523 organizations and found that 51% of these organizations had experienced an insider attack, up from only 39% of organizations three years earlier. That number is probably much higher in that insider attacks often go unreported. The point is that businesses must be vigilant in looking at insider risk the same way they do external risk – perhaps even more.

The white paper goes on to talk about how insider risks manifest themselves and how these attacks are carried out, but the recommendations to reduce these risks is the important takeaway. If businesses would ensure these relatively simple “best practices” are in place, the odds of an insider attack being successful are greatly diminished.

Develop and enforce comprehensive written acceptable use policies. All organizations should have detailed acceptable use policies for all employees and should make employees review and sign the policy annually. This is a basic step but one that organizations often overlook. Having a written security policy will not necessarily prevent insider attacks, but it can still be useful for providing the entire organization with a baseline of what is acceptable usage and the proper methods for handling sensitive data.

• Ineffective management of privileged users. All IT environments have privileged users (admin, root) that have total access to key systems, applications, and information. This is not only a security risk, but it can also make compliance much more difficult. Sharing administrator passwords is another common problem which could lead to inappropriate access to your systems and information and an inability to identify specifically who performed which action on each system.

• Inappropriate role and entitlement assignment. The management of user roles and entitlements is one of the biggest challenges that many IT organizations face. Overlapping roles and duplicated or inconsistent entitlements are all common problems that can Lead to improper access to, and use of, sensitive information. In addition, the lack of automated de-provisioning can Lead to excessive entitlements or orphan accounts, both of which provide openings through which disgruntled insiders can Launch an attack.

• Poor information classification and policy enforcement. Effective protection against improper access or use of information requires strong control over user identities, access, and information use. Most organizations have some controls in these areas, but do not have a unified and robust approach to truly protect their information assets.

• Weak user authentication. Access to highly sensitive information often only requires simple password authentication, and does not take into account other contextual information (e.g., the user's location) that might raise the risk of breach.

• Poor overall identity governance. Effective protection against improper access or use of information requires strong control over user identities, access, and information use. Most organizations have some controls in these areas, but do not have a unified and robust approach to truly protect their information assets.

• Inadequate auditing and analytics. Many companies have no way to continuously audit access to help ensure that only properly authorized individuals are gaining access, and that their use of information complies with established policy. Even if they have auditing tools in place, the sheer volume of Log data generated makes it very difficult for organizations to sift through the data and identify breaches or threats.