Obama Ordered Stuxnet
President Obama was quick to accept cyber attacks as an offensive capability even though the now infamous Stuxnet code broke out of the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran and infiltrated computer systems worldwide according to new reports. Convinced that the Stuxnet virus was still doing damage to Iran, President Obama allowed the attacks to continue. In response to the attacks that Iran originally denied, Iran created its own cyber warfare unit. The United States has just recently acknowledged that it has cyber weapons however it has never admitted to using them. This comes at a time when a new virus’ origins are trying to be determined. That virus is called Flame and it also targeted Iran.
WASHINGTON — 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.
At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.
“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.
Via: NYTimes
