Iranian nuclear plant has been Thunderstruck

[xerex]

“There was also some music playing randomly on several of the workstations during the middle of the night with the volume maxed out. I believe it was playing Thunderstruck by AC/DC.

occam's razor.


the rock music is already on the computers . its what some staff member listens to. the virus just locates whatever MP3s are on the systems and plays them at full volume.

[Sea Skimmer]

If it takes one teenager a week and a half to crack Google's security vulnerabilities I doubt it's as hard as you're making it out to be for a skilled hacker. Emphasis on skilled.

Google Chrome also constantly changes bits of software creating new vulnerabilities, the control systems for safety critical industrial equipment don't get constantly changed like that.

[Vaporous]

“There was also some music playing randomly on several of the workstations during the middle of the night with the volume maxed out. I believe it was playing Thunderstruck by AC/DC.

occam's razor.


the rock music is already on the computers . its what some staff member listens to. the virus just locates whatever MP3s are on the systems and plays them at full volume.

This.

We don't actually have any indication that the supposed malware is playing music. They're just mentioned at the same time and a link as assumed.

Also, "Dirty Deeds" would make a great theme for Stuxnet. .

[General Zod]

“There was also some music playing randomly on several of the workstations during the middle of the night with the volume maxed out. I believe it was playing Thunderstruck by AC/DC.

occam's razor.


the rock music is already on the computers . its what some staff member listens to. the virus just locates whatever MP3s are on the systems and plays them at full volume.

It's not as if MP3 files are especially large, and why would they have it on multiple workstations?

[Straha]

Y'all are mistaking the point of the hacking attacks. It's not to stop the Iranian nuclear program, if Iran wants to develop a nuclear weapon it will develop a nuclear weapon and any single attack will only delay it by at most a couple months. The point, rather, is two-fold and psychological:

First, the people behind this want other countries to know that the Iranian nuclear program is being targeted by like-minded parties and is subject to delays. When the King of Bahrain wakes up and gets a briefing telling him about this attack his doubts about the future of his nation's safety are going to be reassured, and when he meets with the American ambassador to Bahrain he's going to be more likely to believe them when they say that the United States is doing what it takes to halt the Iranian nuclear program even if nothing else is happening. Public attacks like this get attention, which is their (I assume Israel and the United States, though other countries may also be involved) intention.

Second, the Iranian scientists and public hear about it, making the scientists paranoid that the program is insecure and will be struck again and turning the program into a joke for the Public. PressTV (Iranian state controlled television) ran three stories after this attack about how the Iranian nuclear program is really secure, how it doesn't need to fear from outside strikes, and honest their computer security is amazing. I assure you, almost nobody in Iran believes that to be true right now and they are making jokes at the government's expense about this, and the nuclear scientists and technicians are probably paranoid (or at least on edge) about this and are going to blame future screw-ups and errors to hackers. Long story short: The program is sowing dissension, and that's all it needs to do. (Heck, they could simply have programmed it to get into the computers, play a song, and do nothing else and it'd do almost as much damage as a worm that was freezing up computers/causing centrifuges to fail.)

[Exonerate]

But that would be INCREDIBLY, RIDICULOUSLY, ENORMOUSLY idiotic. These operations take years to pull of with teams of dozens or hundreds of skilled malware engineers and they use up vulnerabilities. No sane military/intelligence operation would do that in order to play rock music.

Unless they wanted the Iranians to think "Man, these guys just wasted a bunch of zero day exploits just to play music, how many other exploits do they have that they can afford to toss them away so casually?" Doing something as public as this means mind games.