"Deep inside the computer worm that some specialists suspect is aimed at slowing Iran’s race for a nuclear weapon lies what could be a fleeting reference to the Book of Esther, the Old Testament tale in which the Jews pre-empt a Persian plot to destroy them.
That use of the word 'Myrtus' — which can be read as an allusion to Esther — to name a file inside the code is one of several murky clues that have emerged as computer experts try to trace the origin and purpose of the rogue Stuxnet program, which seeks out a specific kind of command module for industrial equipment.
Not surprisingly, the Israelis are not saying whether Stuxnet has any connection to the secretive cyberwar unit it has built inside Israel’s intelligence service. Nor is the Obama administration, which while talking about cyberdefenses has also rapidly ramped up a broad covert program, inherited from the Bush administration, to undermine Iran’s nuclear program. In interviews in several countries, experts in both cyberwar and nuclear enrichment technology say the Stuxnet mystery may never be solved.
There are many competing explanations for myrtus, which could simply signify myrtle, a plant important to many cultures in the region. But some security experts see the reference as a signature allusion to Esther, a clear warning in a mounting technological and psychological battle as Israel and its allies try to breach Tehran’s most heavily guarded project. Others doubt the Israelis were involved and say the word could have been inserted as deliberate misinformation, to implicate Israel.
'The Iranians are already paranoid about the fact that some of their scientists have defected and several of their secret nuclear sites have been revealed,' one former intelligence official who still works on Iran issues said recently. 'Whatever the origin and purpose of Stuxnet, it ramps up the psychological pressure.'
So a calling card in the code could be part of a mind game, or sloppiness or whimsy from the coders.
The malicious code has appeared in many countries, notably China, India, Indonesia and Iran. But there are tantalizing hints that Iran’s nuclear program was the primary target. Officials in both the United States and Israel have made no secret of the fact that undermining the computer systems that control Iran’s huge enrichment plant at Natanz is a high priority. (The Iranians know it, too: They have never let international inspectors into the control room of the plant, the inspectors report, presumably to keep secret what kind of equipment they are using.)
The fact that Stuxnet appears designed to attack a certain type of Siemens industrial control computer, used widely to manage oil pipelines, electrical power grids and many kinds of nuclear plants, may be telling. Just last year officials in Dubai seized a large shipment of those controllers — known as the Simatic S-7 — after Western intelligence agencies warned that the shipment was bound for Iran and would likely be used in its nuclear program.
'What we were told by many sources,' said Olli Heinonen, who retired last month as the head of inspections at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, 'was that the Iranian nuclear program was acquiring this kind of equipment.'
Also, starting in the summer of 2009, the Iranians began having tremendous difficulty running their centrifuges, the tall, silvery machines that spin at supersonic speed to enrich uranium — and which can explode spectacularly if they become unstable. In New York last week, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, shrugged off suggestions that the country was having trouble keeping its enrichment plants going.
Yet something — perhaps the worm or some other form of sabotage, bad parts or a dearth of skilled technicians — is indeed slowing Iran’s advance.
The reports on Iran show a fairly steady drop in the number of centrifuges used to enrich uranium at the main Natanz plant. After reaching a peak of 4,920 machines in May 2009, the numbers declined to 3,772 centrifuges this past August, the most recent reporting period. That is a decline of 23 percent. (At the same time, production of low-enriched uranium has remained fairly constant, indicating the Iranians have learned how to make better use of fewer working machines.)
Computer experts say the first versions of the worm appeared as early as 2009 and that the sophisticated version contained an internal time stamp from January of this year.
These events add up to a mass of suspicions, not proof. Moreover, the difficulty experts have had in figuring out the origin of Stuxnet points to both the appeal and the danger of computer attacks in a new age of cyberwar.
For intelligence agencies they are an almost irresistible weapon, free of fingerprints. Israel has poured huge resources into Unit 8200, its secretive cyberwar operation, and the United States has built its capacity inside the National Security Agency and inside the military, which just opened a Cyber Command.
But the near impossibility of figuring out where they came from makes deterrence a huge problem — and explains why many have warned against the use of cyberweapons. No country, President Obama was warned even before he took office, is more vulnerable to cyberattack than the United States.
For now, it is hard to determine if the worm has infected centrifuge controllers at Natanz. While the S-7 industrial controller is used widely in Iran, and many other countries, even Siemens says it does not know where it is being used. Alexander Machowetz, a spokesman in Germany for Siemens, said the company did no business with Iran’s nuclear program. 'It could be that there is equipment,' he said in a telephone interview. 'But we never delivered it to Natanz.'
But Siemens industrial controllers are unregulated commodities that are sold and resold all over the world — the controllers intercepted in Dubai traveled through China, according to officials familiar with the seizure.
Ralph Langner, a German computer security consultant who was the first independent expert to assert that the malware had been 'weaponized' and designed to attack the Iranian centrifuge array, argues that the Stuxnet worm could have been brought into the Iranian nuclear complex by Russian contractors.
'It would be an absolute no-brainer to leave an infected USB stick near one of these guys,' he said, 'and there would be more than a 50 percent chance of having him pick it up and infect his computer.'
There are many reasons to suspect Israel’s involvement in Stuxnet. Intelligence is the single largest section of its military and the unit devoted to signal, electronic and computer network intelligence, known as Unit 8200, is the largest group within intelligence.
Yossi Melman, who covers intelligence for the newspaper Haaretz and is at work on a book about Israeli intelligence over the past decade, said in a telephone interview that he suspected that Israel was involved.
He noted that Meir Dagan, head of Mossad, had his term extended last year partly because he was said to be involved in important projects. He added that in the past year Israeli estimates of when Iran will have a nuclear weapon had been extended to 2014.
'They seem to know something, that they have more time than originally thought,' he said.
Then there is the allusion to myrtus — which may be telling, or may be a red herring.
Several of the teams of computer security researchers who have been dissecting the software found a text string that suggests that the attackers named their project Myrtus. The guava fruit is part of the Myrtus family, and one of the code modules is identified as Guava.
It was Mr. Langner who first noted that Myrtus is an allusion to the Hebrew word for Esther. The Book of Esther tells the story of a Persian plot against the Jews, who attacked their enemies pre-emptively.
'If you read the Bible you can make a guess,' said Mr. Langner, in a telephone interview from Germany on Wednesday.
Carol Newsom, an Old Testament scholar at Emory University, confirmed the linguistic connection between the plant family and the Old Testament figure, noting that Queen Esther’s original name in Hebrew was Hadassah, which is similar to the Hebrew word for myrtle. Perhaps, she said, 'someone was making a learned cross-linguistic wordplay.'
But other Israeli experts said they doubted Israel’s involvement. Shai Blitzblau, the technical director and head of the computer warfare laboratory at Maglan, an Israeli company specializing in information security, said he was 'convinced that Israel had nothing to do with Stuxnet.'
'We did a complete simulation of it and we sliced the code to its deepest level,' he said. 'We have studied its protocols and functionality. Our two main suspects for this are high-level industrial espionage against Siemens and a kind of academic experiment.'
Mr. Blitzblau noted that the worm hit India, Indonesia and Russia before it hit Iran, though the worm has been found disproportionately in Iranian computers. He also noted that the Stuxnet worm has no code that reports back the results of the infection it creates. Presumably, a good intelligence agency would like to trace its work." (source)
"The Israeli soldier and the Palestinian police chief, each in uniform, stood before a worn brick wall plastered with pictures of Yasir Arafat, the hostility between them palpable.
'We’ve come to pick up the terrorists hiding here,' the soldier said, not bothering to keep the condescension from his tone.
'This is Palestine,' the police chief replied. 'You have no jurisdiction on this land. Take your men and get lost.'
Heavily armed men behind each man bristled, gripping their weapons tighter in anticipation of the soldier’s reaction."
"The New York Times is agreeing with Hamas - Jews living on their historic homeland are the main evil in the Middle East, and this terror attack highlights the "disruptive role" of their communities.
The terror attack itself is not disruptive. Hell, that's expected. If only those uppity Jews would give in to Hamas' reasonable demands to leave or get slaughtered, then peace would reign.
Also, the New York Times highlights the victims as 'settlers' in the first sentence - not Israelis, not civilians, not travelers. No, the NYT defines them in terms of their pejorative term for proud Jews who exercise their free will and choose to live in a place that has the most spiritual meaning for them."
"ZACHARY B. LIPPMAN, who favors hemp sandals, baggy khakis and an overgrown 5 o’clock shadow, is tending 40,000 tomato plants this summer, including 80 heirloom variants. He is in the second phase of his discovery of a genetic intervention that turns the average tomato plant into a bionic fruit factory. An international patent is, as the saying goes, pending.
'If I had a million dollars, I’d start a seed company tomorrow,' said Dr. Lippman, 32, a scientist with a hunch that the world is insatiable when it comes to tomatoes.
Dr. Lippman did his postdoctoral research on plum tomatoes in Rehovot, Israel, in conjunction with two top geneticists and mentors, Dani Zamir and Yuvel Eshed."
"Small though it is, Israel has been providing more than its share of artistic talent to the global art circuit, especially where video and performance art are concerned.
Over the past decade Guy Ben-Ner has become known for what might be called home videos, starting with a version of 'Moby-Dick' shot in his kitchen, starring himself and his young daughter; Tamy Ben-Tor has startled the art world with scathing depictions of a cast of characters ranging from a pretentious art theorist to an aging Nazi; Mika Rottenberg has created a genre of disorienting video installations centering on women enacting strange tasks; Ohad Meromi, another sculpturally inclined video installationist, has revisited 'The Odyssey' and Brecht."
"A recent spate of arrests of Muslims accused of terrorism in the United States has revealed that many of them were radicalized by militant preaching they found on the Internet.
Now nine influential American Muslim scholars have come together in a YouTube video to repudiate the militants’ message. The nine represent a diversity of theological schools within Islam, and several of them have large followings among American Muslim youths.
The video is one indication that American Muslim leaders are increasingly engaging the war of ideas being waged within Islam."
My Opinion
The world needs more of these types of Muslims to speak out against Radical Islam and their psychotic delusional view on the world and how they solve problems...
Violence never solved any problems, violence begets violence...
I urge any of you sane or rational Muslims out there to speak out against Radical Islam, it does not only benefit the West or Israel, it benefits you too, do not be afraid to go against your "brothers" who are only causing harm to your people and to your religion, they are NOT your friend and they do NOT have you in mind...
Their actions are of purely selfish delusional intent and will get you and them nowhere in the world, stand up against Radical Islam as a Muslim and you will see your world around you change for the better...
It is important to understand that there is nothing wrong with going against your own Muslim brothers and sister if they are the one's who are corrupting your religion and damaging your name day by day, they do not seek balance for your lives, they seek control over everyones lives including yours - If there were no Jews or Christians left on this planet, they would still be fighting you... Take heed the dangers of delusional people, you might become delusional yourself!
It is the fault of others not doing anything about a problem when they see it, it is never too late to make that change, the sooner the better...
"It has long been conventional wisdom that the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a prerequisite to peace and stability in the Middle East. Since Arabs and Muslims are so passionate about the Palestine problem, this argument runs, the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate feeds regional anger and despair, gives a larger rationale to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and to the insurgency in Iraq and obstructs the formation of a regional coalition that will help block Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons.
What, then, are we to make of a recent survey for the Al Arabiya television network finding that a staggering 71 percent of the Arabic respondents have no interest in the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks? 'This is an alarming indicator,' lamented Saleh Qallab, a columnist for the pan-Arab newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat. 'The Arabs, people and regimes alike, have always been as interested in the peace process, its developments and particulars, as they were committed to the Palestinian cause itself.'"
The New York Times has hired a new public editor, Arthur Brisbane, to be an 'advocate' for readers and to uphold 'the highest standards in journalism.' Let’s hope he means it because a backlog of complaints about the publication’s coverage of Israel and the Middle East awaits him.
Among unresolved matters is one evidently too hot for editors to handle."
"'What if the Holocaust has become just another excuse for Israeli bad behavior?' Tony Judt, Israel without Cliches, The New York Times.
I winced when I read it.
I wince whenever the Holocaust is called into play for political gain, or tossed around to symbolize current perceived tragedy. But mostly, I wince for Zaidy Leo."
"A small cinema chain has set off a sharp debate in France about the deadly Israeli raid on a Turkish ship trying to break the blockade of Gaza, and whether some French are overreacting to the episode.
In what was described as a protest against Israeli actions, the Utopia chain canceled all screenings of an Israeli comedy, “Five Hours from Paris,” scheduled to open this month. Instead, it decided to show a French documentary about Rachel Corrie, a young American who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer while she protested the destruction of Palestinian housing in Gaza in 2003."
