U.S. General under investigation for revealing ‘Stuxnet’ to the press

The Washington Post is reporting that the U.S. Department of Justice has begun an official investigation on the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General James Cartwright.  Cartwright is suspected of being the source that exposed a top-secret mission where the Stuxnet virus/worm was uploaded inside Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility.

The U.S. is the first nation known to use a cyber-attack against another with the full intent of stopping or destroying another nation’s development.

In 2010 Iran announced publicly that a malicious virus has some how gotten inside of their nuclear enrichment facility and temporarily disabled the system.  This virus achieved its goal rather successfully and stalled approximately 1,000 centrifuges in the process of enriching uranium.

Iran has denied all accusations that their nuclear program is for weapons, but insist it is strictly for peaceful purposes.

Gen. James E. “Hoss” Cartwright (Ret.). Cartwright previously served as the eighth Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Source: CSIS

How the Stuxnet virus was uploaded into Iran’s servers is unknown at this time, but once inside it was able to fool the system running Windows by showing a faked digital certificate that evaded any automated detection system set up.  From this point it looks for any Siemens industrial software and then takes over causing havoc. The genius of the program is that tricked the engineers into thinking everything was running smoothly.

Stuxnet also made history by leaking out into the Internet and soon discovered once it was on-line. The discovery was due to an engineer working on the centrifuge system and he unwittingly uploaded it to his own laptop.  Upon  his return home he connected to the Internet and the worm was free.

According to some reports the Olympic Games operation was pushed by President Obama in 2010.  Olympic Games was developed under the George W. Bush administration sometime in 2007 and was led General James Cartwright.

Stuxnet details were leaked to the press sometime in 2012 and before the presidential elections, which led some members of congress to believe it was politically motivated. A  criminal probe into the leak was demanded with some Republican Party members accusing the President directly and was to give the voters an impression that he was getting tough on national security.

This latest investigation is just one of many scandals that have plagued the Obama administration.  Just three weeks ago a former NSA employee  by the name of Ed Snowden divulged the highly secretive PRISM program that monitors and records all domestic communications.