Dr Who & Wiping Operating Systems

by Jonathon Blakeley

Dr who’s ability to regenerate, is very like the wiping of an operating system. Wiping an operating system on your computer is always a nervous and traumatic experience, I have found. But each time I do it, it gets easier. Generally for me they last about 5-6 years, I favour Macs myself so I cant say what PC’s are like in that respect. Dr Who is a perfect metaphor for the time travelling operating system of TARDIS except it is the Dr; who gets wiped and regenerated, whilst the TARDIS goes on eternally.

Unfixable errors

After a while one realises that the Operating System is not working quite right. This is where it gets all meta and Interesting. I the operator, notice that the OS has bugs and unfixable errors and it is behaving in odd ways. For me, I must confess this is the result of too much development and hacking the Unix underbelly of my Mac.

So you realise, with a sickening sense of dread, that you have to wipe your lovely Operating system, which you have spent years carefully arranging and cultivating in all its tidy orderliness. But now, the bugs have riddled through the system and you can to not go on. It is bit like taking your favourite pet to the vet to end it. But with computers it is much more personal.

Reluctantly one realises, that it is time to grab the hot data and get out, wipe the OS and start again. The next hours are spent sifting through all the data one had acquired over the years and stashing it on an escape hard drive. Most of the data is questionable. Why did I keep that? I used to gather a lot of audio files, with music I made, these days the data I favour is more text and image based.

Data Salvage

The salvage of data complete, it is time to press the erase button and wipe that universe out and create another. Breathing in deeply you press the button and format the drive. The end starts. Beginning, it writes millions of Zeros over the entire disk again and again and again.

Well that was that you think…. “I wonder what my login and password will be in the new OS?” can’t be the same…. “it is best to move on…”

2 hours later…a new user emerges, different icons and desktops adorn the GUI of the new virgin computer OS. Gradually things are copied from the escape drive to new OS, but not all. A sense comes into being amidst the confusion of the night. Something similar but different, born again.

by Peter Beaumont

The memory sticks were scattered in a washroom at a US military base in the Middle East that was providing support for the Iraq war.

They were deliberately infected with a computer worm, and the undisclosed foreign intelligence agency behind the operation was counting on the fallibility of human nature. According to those familiar with the events, it calculated that a soldier would pick up one of the memory sticks, pocket it and – against regulations – eventually plug it into a military laptop.

It was correct.

The result was the delivery of a self-propagating malicious worm into the computer system of the US military’s central command – Centcom – which would take 14 months to eradicate.

That attack took place in 2008 and was acknowledged by the Pentagon only this August. It was strikingly similar to the recently disclosed cyber attack on Iran‘s nuclear facilities using the Stuxnet worm, which also appears to have used contaminated hardware in an attempt to cripple Iran’s nuclear programme.

Like the attack on Centcom’s computers, the Stuxnet worm, which Iran admits has affected 30,000 of its computers, was a sophisticated attack almost certainly orchestrated by a state. It also appears that intelligence operatives were used to deliver the worm to its goal.

Its primary target, computer security experts say, was a control system manufactured by Siemens and used widely by Iran, not least in its nuclear facilities.

Yesterday, Iran confirmed that the worm had been found on laptops at the Bushehr nuclear reactor, which had been due to go online next month but has now been delayed. It denied the worm had infected the main operating system or caused the delay.

“I say firmly that enemies have failed so far to damage our nuclear systems through computer worms, despite all of their measures, and we have cleaned our systems,” Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s atomic energy agency, told the Iranian Students News Agency.

If the Stuxnet attack on Iran was a limited act of cyber sabotage, on Tuesday the US attempted to imagine what an all-out cyber war might look like and whether it was equipped to deal with it.

In an exercise named Cyber Storm III, involving government agencies and 60 private sector organisations including the banking, chemical, nuclear energy and IT sectors, it presented a scenario where America was hit by a co-ordinated cyber shock-and-awe campaign, hitting 1,500 different targets. The results of the exercise have not been released.

One of those who believes that cyber war has finally come of age is James Lewis of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Lewis said that while previous large-scale hacking attacks had been an annoyance, Stuxnet and the attack on Centcom represented the use of malicious programmes as significant weapons. “Cyber war is already here,” said Lewis. “We are in the same place as we were after the invention of the aeroplane. It was inevitable someone would work out how to use planes to drop bombs. Militaries will now have a cyber-war capability in their arsenals. There are five already that have that capacity, including Russia and China.”

Of those, Lewis said he believed only three had the motivation and capability to mount the Stuxnet attack on Iran: the US, Israel and the UK.

He added that a deliberate hack of an electric generator at the Idaho National Laboratory, via the internet, had previously demonstrated that infrastructure could be persuaded to destroy itself.

“There is growing concern that there has already been hostile reconnaissance of the US electricity grid,” he said.

Last year, the Wall Street Journal quoted US intelligence officials describing how cyber spies had charted the on-off controls for large sections of the US grid and its vulnerability to hacking.

The head of the Pentagon’s newly inaugurated US Cyber Command, General Keith Alexander, has recently said that it is only a matter of time before America is attacked by something like the Stuxnet worm.

In recent testimony to Congress, Alexander underlined how the cyber war threat had rapidly evolved in the past three years, describing two of the most high-profile attacks on countries: a 2007 assault on Estonia, and a 2008 attack on Georgia during its war with Russia, both blamed on Moscow.

via Stuxnet worm heralds new era of global cyberwar | Technology | The Guardian.

Questions, questions so many questions.

Did Gareth Williams the MI6/GCHQ agent make the computer virus, known as Stuxnet, as a Cyber weapon for the UK/ISRAEL?

One could easily imagine……that Gareth was at the heart of Research and Development Unit operating in a Safe house working on cyber viruses and worms in a computer quarantine. Perhaps he had made big breakthroughs that others had heard of and wanted to intergrate into their systems.

Did this information become known to Mosad, or was he working for them, NSA and MI6 in an alliance?

Did they (Moasd) make  an offer to Gareth to Join the Isreali Cyber ops outfit.

Did he refuse and they take it by force and program it to take out Iran’s nuclear stations?

Or is just a coincidence?

1. He certainly had the ability to do such a thing.
2. He was probably one of the UKs Top Computer Experts.
3. He was working on the City of London cyber defenses.
4. So he had knowledge of defensive abilities.
5. presumably he had knowledge of offensive cyber abilities.
6. He had all the resources of the UK military behind him.

A powerful computer code attacking industrial facilities around the world, but mainly in Iran, was probably created by experts working for a country or a well-funded private group, according to an analysis by a leading computer security company.

The malicious code, called Stuxnet, was designed to go after several “high-value targets”, said Liam O Murchu, manager of security response operations at Symantec Corp. But both O Murchu and US government experts say there is no proof it was developed to target nuclear plants in Iran, despite recent speculation from some researchers.

Creating the malicious code required a team of as many as five to 10 highly educated and well-funded hackers. Government experts and outside analysts say they haven’t been able to determine who developed it or why.

The malware has infected as many as 45,000 computer systems around the world. Siemens AG, the company that designed the system targeted by the worm, said it has infected 15 of the industrial control plants it was apparently intended to infiltrate. It is not clear what sites were infected, but they could include water filtration, oil delivery, electrical and nuclear plants.”

via guardian

Has the west started cyber war on Iran
It seems obvious who created the Stuxnet virus

By Stephen Wright

The MI6 spy whose naked body was found in a sports bag in his bath could not have died alone, police believe.They are now certain he was padlocked into the large holdall by someone else. Gareth Williams, 31, who was working on secondment for MI6, was alive when he got into – or was forced into – the bag and died from suffocation.There were no injuries on his body to suggest a struggle and police have still not ruled out the possibility that his death was the culmination of a bizarre sex game that went wrong.But in another mysterious twist, the Mail can reveal that the outer door to Mr Williams’s flat in Pimlico, Central London, had apparently been locked from the outside when police arrived on the scene.Detectives have now intensified their search for a Mediterranean couple known to have been with Mr Williams in the weeks before his death. They are understood to have had a set of keys to the flat.The disclosures come after a month of frenzied speculation about what happened in the flat last month, including theories that Mr Williams committed suicide alone.But as the head of MI6 attended Mr Williams’s funeral near his family home in North Wales yesterday, the Daily Mail can reveal that this line of inquiry has been discounted.We can also reveal that there is no evidence to support claims that Mr Williams was a cross-dresser, that bondage equipment was found at his home, that a laptop was missing from the flat, or that he had reported to spy bosses that he was being followed.Nor, as was claimed in one report, was any suspicious liquid found next to his body in the sports bag.Police have also dismissed allegations of irregularities in his finances and there is no evidence that Mr Williams had committed any criminal acts.

via MI6 spook did NOT die alone: Police certain he was padlocked in bag by someone else | Mail Online.

MI6 ‘used bodily fluids as invisible ink’

British intelligence services experimented with using semen as an invisible ink to write top-secret letters, it has been disclosed.

Published: 1:08PM BST 21 Sep 2010

MI6 ‘used bodily fluids as invisible ink’

A diary entry belonging to a senior member of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) has revealed that during the First World War it was discovered that the bodily fluid could act as an effective invisible ink.

In June 1915, Walter Kirke, deputy head of military intelligence at GHQ France, wrote in his diary that Mansfield Cumming, the first chief (or C) of the SIS was “making enquiries for invisible inks at the London University”.

In October he noted that he “heard from C that the best invisible ink is semen”, which did not react to the main methods of detection. Furthermore it had the advantage of being readily available.

via MI6 ‘used bodily fluids as invisible ink’ – Telegraph.

What is really interesting  is the way this story has been released to distract our attention from the real story – Who killed Gareth Williams and Why?

Sources from Cork, Ireland have been briefed that Apple is in secret talks to buy Yahoo. Apple plans to release a new search engine for the i-phone as an application with apple sponsored adds to provide and SEM element to the Apple brand.  Naturally Apple has denied any such thing.

However it must be noted that, Cork is home to a large plant at Hollyhill, that assembles Computers for the EU market, as well as providing technical support for the EU. If Apple was going to launch a Search Engine, Cork would provide support and technical advice to the European Market.