I remember falling asleep watching C-Span on September 10, 2001. If memory serves it was Joe Biden arguing against it. It's creepy to think about it. It seems like 100 years ago.
I guess I don't see why it is easier to blow up an EMP over Air Force bases in the continental USA than over Air Force bases in forward operating areas, or why it would have more effect on drones than non-drones. Don't you imagine that if they can harden it on a piloted airplane, they harden it in the drone/remote operator setup? I mean, IIRC the B-2's only are based in two or three locations. So wouldn't a couple of EMP's already kill all your B-2's?
I figured that with a pilot on board you have a brain in the plane, to complete the mission or return the equipment whereas with a drone the brain is on the ground and severing the connection paralyzes it. But I am not a big advocate or anything. I would think advances in AI could accomplish the same thing and of course once take the survival of that soft pink bag of goo out of the equation, your fighting vehicle (or space traveling vehicle) becomes much lighter, cheaper and more expendable so it can take on more dangerous missions.
War p*rn: Theories Mount That Stuxnet Worm Sabotaged Iranian Nuke FacilitiesBy ANDY GREENBERG Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife Little doubt remains that the Stuxnet worm represents one of the most sophisticated digital attacks on critical infrastructure systems that cybersecurity researchers have ever seen. The motives of whoever launched that attack is a far murkier question–but a mounting stack of theories is starting to point to a targeted sabotage of Iran’s nuclear facilities. The latest, put forward by Frank Rieger, a researcher at security and encryption firm GSMK, posits in a Frankfurt newspaper (translation here) and on his blog that Stuxnet targetted a nuclear enrichment facility in the Iranian town of Natanz. Stuxnet has spread internationally, but the vast majority of infections have happened in Iran, according to numbers from antivirus firm Symantec in July. Rieger points to signs that Stuxnet was engineered to infect systems as early as January 2009. And in July 2009, whistle-blower site Wikileaks posted a note from an anonymous source describing a nuclear accident in Natanz. The head of Iran’s nuclear program resigned shortly thereafter, and Rieger points to official Iranian numbers that showed a reduction in working enrichment centrifuges. Rieger’s other piece of evidence pointing to Natanz comes from Stuxnet’s architecture. He writes, based on the current analysis of the worm’s software, that its infection is “intended to be synchronized and spread over many nodes.” That makes more sense in an enrichment plant filled with thousands of identical centrifuge units than in a more centralized nuclear power plant, he writes. Robert Langner, another security researcher focused on the Siemens software systems that Stuxnet targets, has performed an analysis that he says shows that Stuxnet has the capability to cause centrifuges to malfunction, but he’s pointed to Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor, not Natanz, as a target, according to the Christian Science Monitor and IDG News. Motives aside, Stuxnet’s sophistication sets it apart from run-of-the-mill malware campaigns by profit-seeking cybercriminals or hobbyists. The worm uses four unique new exploits targeting previously unknown software vulnerabilities (just one was enough for researchers to suspect state-sponsored involvement in the case of Google’s hack earlier this year), multiple clever infection mechanisms, and two digital certificates stolen from Taiwanese companies. All of those pieces point to a complex, multistep targeted attack from a high-resource organization. Stuxnet’s geographic placement and focus on SCADA software–used to run infrastructure systems like electric utilities and factories–also implies state involvement, says James Lewis, a cybersecurity-focused fellow at the Center for Strategic And International Studies. “The target doesn’t relate to economic espionage or financial crime.There’s a good chance it was a government. And there are only five or six governments in the world that could pull off this kind of stunt,” he says. Those potential state actors include the usual suspects, he says: France, the UK, Israel, Russia, China and the United States. “Who would want to do this to Iran?” he asks. “I don’t think we can rule any of them out.” http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenbe...uxnet-worm-sabotaged-iranian-nuke-facilities/
Dubious, I sincerely hope we were responsible. It would be nice if our guys could manage such a comparatively elegant way to slow down Iran's race to build an atomic weapon. More elegant than an air strike, at any rate.
At this point, I'm more concerned with results. Iran with atomic weapons under the current leadership is a train wreck in motion.
Who would have ever thought that, in this war of different worlds, Wells thought out viruses would save us! :grin:
Could have been the Chinese, they are downwind from Iranian fallout if they ever decided to bring on the Qiyamah.
