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New book reveals USA’s cyber sabotage of Middle Eastern nuclear programs

Their book, ‘Fallout: The True Story of the CIA’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking” examines the U.S.’s investigation of A.Q. Khan……the U.S. and its allies had been intercepting, analyzing and tampering with critical technologies used by nations like Libya and Iran for years….

Expert: Stuxnet Just Latest in U.S. Hacks of Covert Nuke Programs | threatpost, 19 Jan 2011, The author of a new book on the evolution of the world’s first nuclear black market says that Stuxnet is just the latest in a long string of efforts by the U.S. and its allies to slow or stop the creation of nuclear programs by rogue nations.

Stuxnet, the world’s most famous industrial malware has spurred questions and controversy. Who created it? what was its purpose? And did it work? But a new book out by journalists Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz claims that Stuxnet was just the latest in a string of covert efforts by the U.S. and its allies to sabotage the nuclear programs of rogue nations, and may have been necessary because of the failure of earlier sabotage attempts.

Their book, ‘Fallout: The True Story of the CIA’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking” examines the U.S.’s investigation of A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and of an extensive black market in nuclear materials. Among the pages of this fascinating account of Khan’s rise and the CIA’s decades-long surveillance of his secretive network are some interesting tidbits that shed light on the possible origins of the Stuxnet worm.

Khan’s network was a critical supplier of nuclear equipment to the regimes in North Korea, Libya and Iran that wanted to build a nuclear weapons programs out of sight of international watch dogs and regulators. Among other things, Khan supplied the Iranian leadership with centrifuges used to enrich uranium that could be used to build a nuclear weapon. Those same centrifuges, we now known, were the primary target of the Stuxnet worm, which is believed to have disabled a good part of Iran’s nuclear enrichment operation and set the country’s progress towards a bomb back by years.

In an interview for the National Public Radio program Fresh Air, Frantz – a former managing editor of the Los Angeles Times and now chief investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – said that the U.S. and its allies had been intercepting, analyzing and tampering with critical technologies used by nations like Libya and Iran for years……..Frantz’s account of the CIA’s efforts to derail budding nuclear programs in Libya and Iran over the last two decades dovetails with recent disclosures about the origins of the Stuxnet worm that suggest that critical intelligence that enabled the worm to manipulate programmable logic controllers (PLCs) used by Iran had come from the U.S.

Expert: Stuxnet Just Latest in U.S. Hacks of Covert Nuke Programs | threatpost

January 20, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA