Who doesn't assume that windows is full of back doors inserted by the NSA (or another no such agency)?

Here's one theory, which is admittedly based entirely on open source information that may not be entirely accurate. In late July and early August two petrochemical factories in southern Iran exploded purportedly due to technical errors. In addition, there have been a number of gas pipeline explosions also ostensibly due to unintentional human error. The Natanz facility has apparently lost 3,000 of its 9,000 centrifuges without declared cause. Likewise, the Bushehr reactor was supposed to go online weeks ago, but has not. The source of the infection appears to be a Russian contractor with extensive work in Iran. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but there are tons of Jewish Russian emigres to Israel that are computer engineers. Israel has long had one of the most advanced high tech sectors. In an unexplained incident, the Israelis barred the Ipad from launching in April because it supposedly uses a more powerful Wifi, which now seems to have been so strictly enforced lest it interfere with their national security electronic operations. In this vein, the Israeli version of the NSA (Unit 8200) has been highlighted recently in news articles as has the Israeli initiation electronically of a kill switch for Syrian radar during the 2007 raid and their theft of Syrian nuclear plans via a Trojan horse. Ehud Barak (Israel's defense minister) recently appeared on Fox News and stated that Iran's goal of nuclear weapons capability was now 1.5-2 years and not the 1 year previously stated. I think the Israelis (Unit 8200? the Mossad?) in conjunction with the NSA have penetrated Iran's computer infrastructure and whenever an industrial plant/critical infrastructure goes online it mysteriously fails. I think the reason the free world is not confident about their ability to take down the Iranian regime's nuclear weapons program solely this way is because of the redundancy in terms of sites and that eventually the Iranians will wisen up. A cyber attack makes sense because it avoids claims of responsibility, which fits with President Obama's MO (think drone strikes in which he displays tourette's with the hellfire missile button) and the Israelis desire to avoid a transparent casus belli that would engender Hezbollah rocket attacks, possibly with Syrian/Iranian provided chemical weapons. Adding to the intrigue, a Syrian/North Korean/Iranian chemical weapons plant in Syria mysteriously exploded in 2007. Remarkable that 70 years after Teller, Bohrs, Einstein, Fineman, Oppenheimer and other Jewish European/American scientists as well as non-Jewish American/European scientists inaugurated the atomic bomb, a 21st century version of this group has now created a guided cyber missile to destroy the Iranian regime's pursuit of a nuclear weapon. This is particularly astounding since it's not only a cyber weapon, but light years ahead of anyone else. It's as if air to surface missiles had not been invented and the free world already has JDAMs. I should say that I believe the Iranian regime has enslaved a great people, the Persian people and 2,000 years after King Cyrus of Persia helped the Jews build their second state of Israel, the third Jewish state of Israel will return the favor. Ironically, Ahmadenijad has threatened to wipe Israel off the map, but if not for the Osirak attack, Iran would have been wiped off the map as Saddam Hussein used WMD (chemical) in the Iraq-Iran war.

I believe the Israelis are the primary architects not merely because they are unabashedly aggressive in preventing their sworn enemies from acquiring nuclear capabilities (Syria-2007, Iraq -1981), but unlike the United States would not hesitate to launch a covert first strike. This is confirmed by the prescient reuters article as well as the US statement concerning its unwillingness to strike preemptively through cyber war. Taking into consideration the technical aspects, the Israelis also emerge as the most likely driver of this project. Apparently, the zero day vulnerabilities of Microsoft were exploited in addition to Siemens PLC vulnerabilities and stolen certificates from a Taiwanese company. I have a hard time believing the US would conduct corporate espionage on an American based firm. I doubt the Israelis would have any moral qualms developing an asset at Microsoft or simply stealing the information. Certainly, the constant shuttling of Ehud Barak to DC recently cannot all be explained by an obsession with Israel's qualitative military advantage, which they manage to maintain despite all of these meetings. Clearly, he has been updating Sec Def Gates on Iran mono a mono. Sec Def Gates leaked memo in January about the lack of contingency plans for confronting Iran militarily also began six months before the virus was first noted. Clearly, he knew about it and realized that this would potentially spark a regional conflagration, when the Stuxnet effects were understood by its victims. As for the theory about the issues with projects going online: PLCs supposedly control critical functions of industrial production. I think the virus is written in a way that activates a change in parameters, when an industrial activity starts up as opposed to merely cause self destruction, when initially infected. This allows for greater deniability as well more harm since time/money/manpower has been completely invested and lost. This virus has supposedly been around since early 2009, coinciding with President Obama's tenure. The Israelis may have decided to undertake this while George W. Bush was in office to hedge their bets in case the new commander in chief did not have the willingness to confront Iran. I think whatever systems are infected are already inexorably sabotaged.

While it is possible that the Germans are involved too, I believe the Brits have played a part as well. The NSA and their British counterpart GCHQ work closely together. GCHQ is one of the most sophisticated electronic government agencies in the world. In addition, a GCHQ employee, Gareth Williams, was murdered a month ago. He was apparently working closely with the NSA and seconded to MI6 on a cyber weapons project. He had spent the past year on sabbatical after working at Fort Meade (NSA). This may be trivial, but his father is an employee at Wylfa nuclear power station and, in an indirect way, he likely understood how to take down a similar installation. Also, a middle eastern person between 20-30 was reportedly seen leaving the apartment building. Maybe the Iranians could only get to him because the Iranian regime has a presence there as opposed to the US or Israel. He was killed in August by which time the Iranians were likely aware of the malware (it was initially reported by a Bulgarian firm in June). Not to be a master of the obvious, but regardless, his death is tragic.

First of all, I own seven computers, only one of which is a Windows box (XP). Windows is _not_ my favorite operating system.

1. In response to the hidden trap door theories, MS provides the source code for its Windows systems to people who have a legitimate need to see it. This includes foreign governments that are concerned about trap doors. If MS removed a trap door before allowing an expert to see the source code, it would be simple to detect. If you have the source code, you can compile it, and then compare the compiled files with the Windows files in use. If there are any differences, then you know that the source code you are viewing is not the source code that MS used to compile the files that it distributes. So MS has no way of hiding a trap door from the governments and experts it allows to view the source code.

2. Before the Internet, viruses spread via floppy disks. Computer labs had rules against bringing in your own floppy disks and installing your own software. This wasn't a perfect solution, but it worked pretty well. There's a very simple solution for viruses that depend on the Internet; disconnect the computer from the Internet. In this case, while the worm reportedly depends on a security hole in Windows, it spread to the Iranian systems via the current equivalent of an infected floppy disk; an infected USB memory stick. And its functioning depends at least partly on using the Internet to connect to an outside system. So the critical security failures here had nothing to do with Windows, but were due to policies that allowed a contractor to insert a USB stick of unknown provenance into a critical system drive, and allowed the same critical system to connect to the Internet.

3. Windows is by far the most common OS in use today. Basing your control system on Windows means that most of the people using the control system will be familiar with the OS, which in turn reduces training costs and operator errors. Most security failures are due to either bad policy or lax enforcement. Basing a control system on a more secure OS won't eliminate the majority of security failures. Switching from Windows to another OS would have raised user costs without a corresponding increase in security. And given the sophistication of the Stuxnet worm and the laxness of Iranian security, the experts that created Stuxnet probably could have figured out a way to crack any other OS.

John Markoff, the longtime tech reporter for the New York Times, takes on this question in today's paper. "If Stuxnet is the latest example of what a government organization can do, it contains some glaring shortcomings".

The above is so far off target that it would seem to be driven by solely by political considereations.

Markoff is most likely sympathetic to Iran and against sanctions, and considers Stuxnet a "terrorist attack".

Many of Stuxnet's features are totally groundbreaking and one of those features is that it will only do harm to an envirironment that meets a whole array of very specific criteria.

"The program was splattered on thousands of computer systems around the world, and much of its impact has been on those systems, rather than on what appears to have been its intended target, Iranian equipment".

What harm did Stuxnet do to those computers?

Stuxnet is not about destroying computers!

Markoff writes for the NYT which I stopped reading many moons ago because of its extreme left wing bias and this widely publized drivel simply confirms the correctness of my decision.