02.01.11

Foot in Mouth Disease

Posted in Cyberterrorism at 10:04 am by George Smith


Ludicrous. Do it again, must break finger.

Talk to the press hot on a story of mythic proportion too much, you can screw up.

Today’s case, Ralph Langner, the German computer security expert, perhaps seeking to defuse some of the mania now surrounding the Stuxnet worm.

From AP, where the reporter and editor obviously don’t know much about nuclear reactors and the difference between fission and fusion:

But German cybersecurity researcher Ralph Langner says that, while the virus has infested the reactor’s computers, “Stuxnet cannot technically mess with the systems in Bushehr.

“Bottom line: A thermonuclear explosion cannot be triggered by something like Stuxnet,” said Langner, who has led research into Stuxnet’s effects on the Siemens equipment running Iran’s nuclear programs.

Thermonuclear explosion. Ahem.

See here — Google is your friend.

For the computer security man and AP reporter:

Fellows, regardless of your position on the story, nuclear reactors generate energy through fission. A thermonuclear reaction is the hydrogen bomb, a different animal. Sadly, nuclear reactors aren’t potential fusion bombs.

Oof. The only thing that’s gone thermonuclear on Stuxnet is the reporting, so to speak.

Route this one to trash.

Actually, there’s a bit of humor here.

If Stuxnet actually could cause a thermonuclear explosion, the presumed joint Israeli/US malware operation would have accidentally given the Iranians a much bigger bomb than the one they’re trying to make.

2 Comments

  1. Major Variola (ret) said,

    February 1, 2011 at 7:55 pm

    Odd —Langner is pretty smart, to confuse these things.

    Look up zippe centrifuges, resonance, bellows, critical speed.

    Suddenly slowing the rotors, as Stuxnet did, will trash them. The Iranians probably lost a few hundred to thousand columns before they got a clue.
    The rootkit (hiding) aspects of S. no doubt impeded debugging.

    Attach a drinking straw to dremel and spin.

  2. George Smith said,

    February 1, 2011 at 8:35 pm

    Unfortunately, the story has grown well beyond reliable reporting. The original NYT piece that bases all failure on Stuxnet buried the news that the Iran’s centrifuges are unreliable kit. Even sans a push, they fail. And, one might assume, the longer they run the more the likelihood of failure perhaps complicated by poor technical administration. So did Stuxnet give them a push or did it not even matter? One cannot say from the news that’s available.

    Anyway, last item of the day — on the movie Iranium — shows the far right GOP doesn’t give a shit about that anyway. It wants to bomb Iran and has made a movie about it.

    Should be a decent way to waste an hour next week..