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Wary of naked force, Israelis eye cyberwar on Iran
(Reuters) In the late 1990s, a computer specialist from Israel's Shin Bet internal security service hacked into the mainframe of the Pi Glilot fuel depot north of Tel Aviv. It was meant to be a routine test of safeguards at the strategic site. But it also tipped off the Israelis to the potential such hi-tech infiltrations offered for real sabotage.

"Once inside the Pi Glilot system, we suddenly realised that, aside from accessing secret data, we could also set off deliberate explosions, just by programming a re-route of the pipelines," said a veteran of the Shin Bet drill.
Supposedly CIA director Bill Casey did something like this to the Russians in the early 1980s. The story was, the Rooskies had stolen gobs of American computer hardware and software for both military and industrial purposes. Reagan didn't like it, and Casey devised a plan: let the Rooskies steal stuff, but embed the hardware with defective chips that would fail. Supposedly a really big kaboom in 1982 at the trans-Siberian gas pipeline was the result of that. That in turn caused the Rooskies to question everything they'd stolen. The CIA operatives had a good laugh about it. You can read the story here.
So began a cyberwarfare project which, a decade on, is seen by independent experts as the likely new vanguard of Israel's efforts to foil the nuclear ambitions of its arch-foe Iran. "We came to the conclusion that, for our purposes, a key Iranian vulnerability is in its on-line information," said one recently retired Israeli security cabinet member, using a generic term for digital networks. "We have acted accordingly."

Cyberwarfare teams nestle deep within Israel's spy agencies, which have rich experience in traditional sabotage techniques and are cloaked in official secrecy and censorship. They can draw on the know-how of Israeli commercial firms that are among the world's hi-tech leaders and whose staff are often veterans of elite military intelligence computer units. Technolytics Institute, an American consultancy, last year rated Israel the sixth-biggest "cyber warfare threat", after China, Russia, Iran, France and "extremist/terrorist groups".
I'm sure the Technolytics Institute means "threat" in a generalized capabilities assessment. Surely they don't mean to imply that Israel would ever choose to directly threaten America!
Asked to speculate about how Israel might target Iran, Scott Borg, director of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, which advises Washington agencies on cyber security, said malware -- a commonly used abbreviation for "malicious software" -- could be inserted to corrupt, commandeer or crash the controls of sensitive sites like uranium enrichment plants.

Such attacks could be immediate, he said. Or they might be latent, with the malware loitering unseen and awaiting an external trigger, or pre-set to strike automatically when the infected facility reaches a more critical level of activity. As Iran's nuclear assets would probably be isolated from outside computers, hackers would be unable to access them directly, Borg said. Israeli agents would have to conceal the malware in software used by the Iranians or discreetly plant it on portable hardware brought in, unknowingly, by technicians. "A contaminated USB stick would be enough," Borg said.

Ali Ashtari, an Iranian businessman executed as an Israeli spy last year, was convicted of supplying tainted communications equipment for one of Iran's secret military projects. Iranian media quoted a security official as saying that Ashtari's actions "led to the defeat of the project with irreversible damage". Israel declined all comment on the case.

Israel may be open to a more overt strain of cyberwarfare. Tony Skinner of Jane's Defence Weekly cited Israeli sources as saying that Israel's 2007 bombing of an alleged atomic reactor in Syria was preceded by a cyber attack which neutralised ground radars and anti-aircraft batteries.
*snicker*

Posted by: trailing wife 2009-07-08
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=273820