Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

You Ain't Seen Nothin Yet

Before continuing into the STUXNET with an explanation of facts and assumptions allow me to comment on a few things happening on the the world at large.

First, as many of my readers are already aware, Mr. Snowdon is being debriefed by the Russians in the Moscow Airport. As I mentioned before, his earlier revelations were regarding how to use telephone records to catch terrorists and how to enter and manipulate computer records. It appears that Snowdon knows a bit more than that. Yesterday I heard that the Soviets are searching around for old style typewriters and intend to convert all their Top Secret documents from an electronic format into a paper copy. That is a staggering undertaking and it appears our defector has told the Russians things that boggle the imagination. I'm beginning to suspect that we know more about the electronic files of our neighbors than they realize. Think about it. How long would it take you to manually convert all your computer files using a manual Underwood typewriter? It would have to be a pretty serious threat to consider such a giant step backward and investing that amount of time and effort.

But then think about what was accomplished in slowing the Iranian Nuclear Program. The bug got through the firewall and subtly started wreaking havoc on the centrifuges operated by a computer controlled nerve center. Heck! If you can do that you don’t have to try and shoot down an ICBM the old fashioned way--- you simply get inside and reprogram the impact coordinates for wherever the missile launched from. Now that would constitute a headache for a would be aggressor. Is that real deterrence or what? Most of us understand about hacking and stealing information but the implications of a cyber weapon that can shake apart a machine hooked to a computer hasn’t sunk into most people’s minds.

So what do the Russians intend to do once they get that room full of clerks going on their mechanical typewriters. Well, the next step is to reprogram their missiles going from a digital/electronic guidance system format to a mechanical one. What would that entail? It would mean dusting off key punch typewriters, that once produced those eighty-column cards and using them to set the guidance components of the missiles. I guess the next thing the Russians will be doing is searching museums for those old IBM workstations with a tandem setup to make sure two operators produced an identical card. If that isn’t absurd I don’t know what is.

One of the purposes of STUXNET was to get into the minds of the Iranian scientists. To me this result is even more important than shaking a few centrifuges apart. Anybody who has ever tried to program knows how complicated it can get--- trouble shooting and finding out where all the glitches are. Usually, once the bugs are worked out, a programmer can move onto the next stage in development. Well forget that! Consider what changing a a few characters in the source code can do to an operating system. Offensive Cypher warfare is going to take computer hacking from the horse drawn era into orbit.