THE WISDOM FUND: News & Views
March 25, 2013
Wired

NATO Researchers: Stuxnet Attack on Iran Was Illegal 'Act of Force'

by Kim Zetter

A cyberattack that sabotaged Iran's uranium enrichment program was an "act of force" and was likely illegal, according to research commissioned by NATO's cyberwarfare center.

"Acts that kill or injure persons or destroy or damage objects are unambiguously uses of force" and likely violate international law, according to the Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, a study produced by international legal experts at the request of NATO's Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence in Estonia. . . .

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CYBER THREAT REALTIME MAP

Tahani Karrar, "Third Middle East Undersea Cable Cut," Zawya Dow Jones, February 1, 2008

M J Rosenberg, "The Coming Iran War," Huffington Post, May 28, 2010

Seumas Milne, "War on Iran Has Already Begun," Guardian, December 7, 2011

Pepe Escobar, "Surrender Now or We'll Bomb You Later," Asia Times, April 11, 2012

Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, "Obama orders US to draw up overseas target list for cyber-attacks," guardian.co.uk, June 7, 2012

VIDEO: "Rise of the Hackers," PBS Nova, September, 2014

Kim Zetter, "The Evidence That North Korea Hacked Sony Is Flimsy," wired.com, December 17, 2014

Edward Snowden on Cyber Warfare, January 18, 2015

Nafeez Ahmed, "How the CIA made Google," medium.com, January 22, 2015

[Yet the 2015 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. intelligence community submitted recently to the Senate Armed Services Committee has explicitly conceded that the risk of "cyber Armageddon" is at best "remote."--Bill Blunden, "Cyber Armageddon is a Myth," counterpunch.org, March 23, 2015]

Nick Schager, "The Terrifying U.S.-Israeli Computer Worm That Could Cause World War III," thedailybeast.com, July 9, 2016

John McAfee: about blockchain, bitcoins and cyber security, February 23, 2017


"How Israel Rules The World Of Cyber Security," VICE News, March 14, 2018

[the wider campaign involved close cooperation with the U.S., which famously collaborated to develop the Stuxnet computer virus responsible for destroying hundreds of Iranian centrifuges--Sebastien Roblin, "How Israel Tried to Destroy Iran's Nuclear Program: Assassinate the Scientists," nationalinterest.org, June 2, 2018]

Documentary about Stuxnet: Zero Days, February 16, 2019

The true story of the most devastating cyberattack in history and the desperate hunt to identify and track the elite Russian agents behind it--Andy Greenberg, "Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers," Doubleday (November 5, 2019)

In the Age of AI (full documentary), FRONTLINE, December 2, 2019

johnk, "100 Hacking Tools and Resources," hackerone.com, May 29, 2020

"Israel's alleged Natanz strike 'as complex as Stuxnet,' a major blow to Iran," timesofisrael.com, July 10, 2020

Frank Konkel, "CIA Awards Secret Multibillion-Dollar Cloud Contract," nextgov.com, November 20, 2020

"Mohsen Fakhrizadeh: Iran blames Israel for killing top scientist," bbc.com, November 28, 2020

"Israeli Pegasus spyware allegedly used to hack phones of dozens of Al Jazeera journalists in large-scale attack - report," rt.com, December 21, 2020

The Spy in Your Phone, Al Jazeera World, January 6, 2021

Zero-day: a software bug that allows a hacker to break into your devices . . . For decades, the United States government became the world's dominant hoarder of zero-days . . . Then the United States government lost control of the hoard and the market. (jacket inside) . . .

President George W. Bush needed something to get the Israelis off his back that didn't entail starting World War III. (Chapter 9, p117) . . .

To be fair, we were doing the same in Iran. We had been for years, actually. Under a highly classified program conceived under Bush but acceleratated under Obama -- code named Nitro Zeus -- U.S. Cyber Command started planting time bombs in Iran's communications systems, air defenses, and critical parts of its grid. By June 2019 it was safe to assume that Iran's attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure was Tehran responding in kind. What the security community witnessed that summer was, in effect, mutually assured destruction in real time. (p355) -- Nicole Perlroth, "This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race," Bloomsbury Publishing; 1st edition (February 9, 2021)

"Iran says key Natanz nuclear facility hit by 'sabotage'," bbc.com, April 12, 2021

Barkha Dutt, The Pegasus Expose: Indian Media Being Spied On With Israeli Software?, July 18. 2021

"Full text: India Supreme Court order on Pegasus snooping," indianexpress.com, October 27, 2021

Supreme Court on Pegasus, its far reaching significance for liberty & free press, ThePrint, October 27, 2021

Russia busts notorious ransomware group wanted by US, RT America January 18, 2022

[Pegasus played a critical role in securing the support of Arab nations in Israel's campaign against Iran and negotiating the Abraham Accords--Michael Levenson, ""FBI Secretly Bought Israeli Spyware and Explored Hacking U.S. Phones," nytimes.com, Jaunary 28, 2022]

Elon Musk - "Something MAJOR Is About To TAKE PLACE!" Inner Vision, Jaunary 31, 2022

Mara Hvistendahl, Sam Biddle, "WHY HAVE 14 OF 15 U.S. CABINET DEPARTMENTS BOUGHT PHONE UNLOCKING TECHNOLOGY?," theintercept.com, February 8, 2022

Sam Biddle and Jack Poulson, "AMERICAN PHONE-TRACKING FIRM DEMO'D SURVEILLANCE POWERS BY SPYING ON CIA AND NSA," theintercept.com, April 22, 2022

What Makes Israel So Good at Hacking?, Cyberspatial, September 2022

[Even the U.S. government is using it.--Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman and Matina Stevis-Gridneff, "How the Global Spyware Industry Spiraled Out of Control," nytimes.com, December 8, 2022, 2022]

How the Internet was Stolen, Then & Now, December 20, 2022

[One of Team Jorge's key services is a sophisticated software package, Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims. It controls a vast army of thousands of fake social media profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram and YouTube."--Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Manisha Ganguly, David Pegg, Carole Cadwalladr and Jason Burke, "Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections," theintercept.com, April 22, 2022]

[NSO Group's software targeted activists, journalists, politicians and executives.--Stephen Shankland, "Pegasus Spyware and Citizen Surveillance," cnet.com, July 19, 2022]

The "most influential English language philosopher of the nineteenth century" John Stuart Mill: "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that," is often cited as a key principle of critical thinking and reasoned debate. The idea is that in order to have a truly informed and well-reasoned opinion, it is important to consider and understand multiple perspectives and arguments, even those that one may ultimately disagree with.--Enver Masud, "9/11: ChatGPT Answers Not Always Valid," The Wisdom Fund, March 6, 2023

How U.S. CIA conducts cyberattacks on other countries, CGTN, May 4, 2023

[FBI violated the constitutional rights of 278,000 Americans in 2020 and 2021 with warrantless searches of their email and other electronic data.--Jim Bovard, "Biggest FBI Spy Scandal of the Year," libertarianinstitute.org, May 25, 2023]

Ex-Google Officer Finally Speaks Out On The Dangers Of AI! Diary of a CEO (Mohammad "Mo" Gawdat), June 1, 2023

Timothy B Lee and Sean Trott, "A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work," arstechnica.com, July 31, 2023

Mustafa Suleyman: The AI Pioneer Reveals the Future in 'The Coming Wave' | Intelligence Squared, September 16, 2023

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, "What AI architects fear most," axios.com, November 8, 2023

Scientists warn of AI collapse, Sabine Hossenfelder, January 29, 2024

OpenAI unveils text-to-video tool Sora, NBC News, February 16, 2024

AI Is Turning Into Something Totally New | Mustafa Suleyman | TED, April 22, 2024

AI Just Got Insanely Better, Asmongold TV, May 14, 2024

China's MASSIVE Ocean Project Is About To Change The World, Cyrus Janssen, May 16, 2024

['Hallucinations' are a critical problem for natural language generation systems using large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT or Gemini, because users cannot trust that any given output is correct.--Sebastian Farquhar, Jannik Kossen, Lorenz Kuhn & Yarin Gal, "Detecting hallucinations in large language models using semantic entropy," nature.com, June 19, 2024]

The "Modern Day Slaves" Of The AI Tech World, June 25, 2024

Hackers expose deep cybersecurity vulnerabilities in AI, BBC News, June 27, 2024

Next Up for AI? Dancing Robots | Catie Cuan | TED, July 2, 2024

Mustafa Suleyman on The Coming Wave of AI, with Zanny Minton Beddoes, Intelligence Squared, July 5, 2024

Maya Murad, What are AI Agents? IBM Technology, July 15, 2024

How Technology is Reshaping Scams, ABC Science, Aug 6, 2024

Yuval Noah Harari, "We Are on the Verge of Destroying Ourselves," pbs.org, September 17, 2024

Rob Braxman, Why the iPhone 16 Should Scare You, September 25, 2024

COMMENT: It appears that we're headed toward more restrictions on free speech, eg. Facebook's criteria are so broadly stated that they can exclude discussion of subjects such as, "Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich."-- Sir Peter Ustinov

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