The most dangerous and sophisticated computer virus in the world - Stuxnet

The most sophisticated software in history was written by a team of people whose names we do not know.

It’s a computer worm. The worm was written, probably, between 2005 and 2010.

Because the worm is so complex and sophisticated, I can only give the most superficial outline of what it does.

This worm exists first on a USB drive. Someone could just find that USB drive lying around, or get it in the mail, and wonder what was on it. When that USB drive is inserted into a Windows PC, without the user knowing it, that worm will quietly run itself, and copy itself to that PC. It has at least three ways of trying to get itself to run. If one way doesn’t work, it tries another. At least two of these methods to launch itself were completely new then, and both of them used two independent, secret bugs in Windows that no one else knew about, until this worm came along.

Once the worm runs itself on a PC, it tries to get administrator access on that PC. It doesn’t mind if there’s antivirus software installed — the worm can sneak around most antivirus software. Then, based on the version of Windows it’s running on, the worm will try one of two previously unknown methods of getting that administrator access on that PC. Until this worm was released, no one knew about these secret bugs in Windows either.

At this point, the worm is now able to cover its tracks by getting underneath the operating system, so that no antivirus software can detect that it exists. It binds itself secretly to that PC, so that even if you look on the disk for where the worm should be, you will see nothing. This worm hides so well, that the worm ran around the Internet for over a year without any security company in the world recognizing that it even existed.

The software then checks to see if it can get on the Internet. If it can, it attempts to visit either http://www.mypremierfutbol.com or http://www.todaysfutbol.com . At the time, these servers were in Malaysia and Denmark. It opens an encrypted link and tells these servers that it has succeeded in owning a new PC. The worm then automatically updates itself with the newest version.

At this point, the worm makes copies of itself to any other USB sticks you happen to plug in. It does this by installing a carefully designed but fake disk driver. This driver was digitally signed by Realtek, which means that the authors of the worm were somehow able to break into the most secure location in a huge Taiwanese company, and steal the most secret key that this company owns, without Realtek finding out about it.

Later, whoever wrote that driver started signing it with secret keys from JMicron, another big Taiwanese company. Yet again, the authors had to figure out how to break into the most secure location in that company and steal the most secure key that that company owns, without JMicron finding out about it.

This worm we are talking about is sophisticated.

And it hasn’t even got started yet.

At this point, the worm makes use of two recently discovered Windows bugs. One bug relates to network printers, and the other relates to network files. The worm uses those bugs to install itself across the local network, onto all the other computers in the facility.

Now, the worm looks around for a very specific bit of control software, designed by Siemens for automating large industrial machinery. Once it finds it, it uses (you guessed it) yet another previously unknown bug for copying itself into the programmable logic of the industrial controller. Once the worm digs into this controller, it’s in there for good. No amount of replacing or disinfecting PCs can get rid of the worm now.

The worm checks for attached industrial electric motors from two specific companies. One of those companies is in Iran, and the other is in Finland. The specific motors it searches for are called variable-frequency drives. They’re used for running industrial centrifuges. You can purify many kinds of chemicals in centrifuges.

Such as uranium.

Now at this point, since the worm has complete control of the centrifuges, it can do anything it wants with them. The worm can shut them all down. The worm can destroy them all immediately — just spin them over maximum speed until they all shatter like bombs, killing anyone who happens to be standing near.

But no. This is a sophisticated worm. The worm has other plans.

Once it controls every centrifuge in your facility… the worm just goes to sleep.

Days pass. Or weeks. Or seconds.

When the worm decides the time is right, the worm quietly wakes itself up. The worm randomly picks a few of those centrifuges while they are purifying uranium. The worm locks them, so that if someone notices that something is wrong, a human can’t turn the centrifuges off.

And then, stealthily, the worm starts spinning those centrifuges… a little wrong. Not a crazy amount wrong, mind you. Just, y’know, a little too fast. Or a little too slow. Just a tiny bit out of safe parameters.

At the same time, it increases the gas pressure in those centrifuges. The gas in those centrifuges is called UF6. Pretty nasty stuff. The worm makes the pressure of that UF6, just a tiny bit out of safe parameters. Just enough that the UF6 gas in the centrifuges, has a small chance of turning into rock, while the centrifuge is spinning.

Centrifuges don’t like running too fast or too slow. And they don’t like rocks either.

The worm has one last trick up its sleeve. And it’s pure evil genius.

In addition to everything else it’s doing, the worm is now playing us back a 21-second data recording on our computer screens that it captured when the centrifuges were working normally.

The worm plays the recording over and over, in a loop.

As a result, all the centrifuge data on the computer screens looks completely fine, to us humans.

But it’s all just a fake recording, produced by the worm.

Now let’s imagine that you are responsible for purifying uranium using this huge industrial factory. And everything seems to be working okay. Maybe some of the motors sound a little off, but all the numbers on the computer show that the centrifuge motors are running exactly as designed.

Then the centrifuges start breaking. Randomly, one after another. Usually they die quietly. Rarely though, they make a scene when they die. And the uranium yield, it keeps plummeting. Uranium has to be pure. Your uranium is not pure enough to do anything useful.

What would you do, if you were running that uranium enrichment facility? You’d check everything over and over and over, not understanding why everything was off. You could replace every single PC in your facility if you wanted to.

But the centrifuges would go right on breaking. And you have no possible way of knowing why.

And on your watch, eventually, about 1000 centrifuges would fail or be taken offline. You’d go a little crazy, trying to figure out why nothing was working as designed.

That is exactly what happened.

You would never expect that all those problems were caused by a computer worm, the most devious and intelligent computer worm in history, written by some incredibly secret team with unlimited money and unlimited resources, designed with exactly one purpose in mind: to sneak past every known digital defense, and to destroy your country’s nuclear bomb program, all without getting caught.

To have one piece of software do any ONE of those things would be a small miracle. To have it do ALL of those things and many more, well…

… the Stuxnet worm would have to be the most sophisticated software ever written.

Sources here, here, and here.

This is the answer posted by a quora user. Since it was kind of story telling so I didn't change anything. 

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-sophisticated-piece-of-software-code-ever-written 

Alan Turing: The codebreaker who saved 'millions of lives'

Alan Turing - the Bletchley Park codebreaker - would have been 100 years old on 23 June had he lived to the present day.

To mark the occasion the BBC commissioned a week-long series of articles to explore his many achievements. This second essay examines the impact the British mathematician had on the outcome of World War II.

Turing's Treatise on Enigma helped break Germany's encrypted messages

Germany's Army, Air Force and Navy transmitted many thousands of coded messages each day during World War II.

These ranged from top-level signals, such as detailed situation reports prepared by generals at the battle fronts, and orders signed by Hitler himself, down to the important minutiae of war like weather reports and inventories of the contents of supply ships.

Thanks to Turing and his fellow codebreakers, much of this information ended up in allied hands - sometimes within an hour or two of it being transmitted.

The faster the messages could be broken, the fresher the intelligence that they contained, and on at least one occasion an intercepted Enigma message's English translation was being read at the British Admiralty less than 15 minutes after the Germans had transmitted it.

Turing helped adapt a device originally developed by Poland to create the bombe

On the first day of war, at the beginning of September 1939, Turing took up residence at Bletchley Park, the ugly Victorian Buckinghamshire mansion that served as the wartime HQ of Britain's top codebreakers.

There he was a key player in the battle to decrypt the coded messages generated by Enigma, the German military's typewriter-like cipher machine.

Bletchley's bombes

Turing pitted machine against machine. The prototype model of his anti-Enigma "bombe", named simply Victory, was installed in the spring of 1940.

His bombes turned Bletchley Park into a codebreaking factory. As early as 1943 Turing's machines were cracking a staggering total of 84,000 Enigma messages each month - two messages every minute.

Turing personally broke the form of Enigma that was used by the U-boats preying on the North Atlantic merchant convoys.

It was a crucial contribution. The convoys set out from North America loaded with vast cargoes of essential supplies for Britain, but the U-boats' torpedoes were sinking so many of the ships that Churchill's analysts said Britain would soon be starving.

"The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril," Churchill said later.

Just in time, Turing and his group succeeded in cracking the U-boats' communications to their controllers in Europe. With the U-boats revealing their positions, the convoys could dodge them in the vast Atlantic waste.

The bombe's operators read decrypted German messages by marking the position of its drums

The Turingery

Turing also searched for a way to break into the torrent of messages suddenly emanating from a new, and much more sophisticated, German cipher machine.

The British codenamed the new machine Tunny. The Tunny teleprinter communications network, a harbinger of today's mobile phone networks, spanned Europe and North Africa, connecting Hitler and the Army High Command in Berlin to the front-line generals.

Turing's breakthrough in 1942 yielded the first systematic method for cracking Tunny messages. His method was known at Bletchley Park simply as Turingery, and the broken Tunny messages gave detailed knowledge of German strategy - information that changed the course of the war.

"Turingery was our one and only weapon against Tunny during 1942-3", explains ninety-one year old Captain Jerry Roberts, once section leader in the main Tunny-breaking unit known as the Testery.

"We were using Turingery to read what Hitler and his generals were saying to each other over breakfast, so to speak."

Turingery was the seed for the sophisticated Tunny-cracking algorithms that were incorporated in Tommy Flowers' Colossus, the first large-scale electronic computer.

With the installation of the Colossi - there were ten by the end of the war - Bletchley Park became the world's first electronic computing facility.

Turing's work on Tunny was the third of the three strokes of genius that he contributed to the attack on Germany's codes, along with designing the bombe and unravelling U-boat Enigma.

Ending the war

Turing and Bletchley Park's other cryptologists helped counter the threat posed by Germany's U-boats

Turing stands alongside Churchill, Eisenhower, and a short glory-list of other wartime principals as a leading figure in the Allied victory over Hitler. There should be a statue of him in London among Britain's other leading war heroes.

Some historians estimate that Bletchley Park's massive codebreaking operation, especially the breaking of U-boat Enigma, shortened the war in Europe by as many as two to four years.

If Turing and his group had not weakened the U-boats' hold on the North Atlantic, the 1944 Allied invasion of Europe - the D-Day landings - could have been delayed, perhaps by about a year or even longer, since the North Atlantic was the route that ammunition, fuel, food and troops had to travel in order to reach Britain from America.

Harry Hinsley, a member of the small, tight-knit team that battled against Naval Enigma, and who later became the official historian of British intelligence, underlined the significance of the U-boat defeat.

Any delay in the timing of the invasion, even a delay of less than a year, would have put Hitler in a stronger position to withstand the Allied assault, Hinsley points out.

The UK government did not disclose details of the efforts to crack the Enigma machine until 1974

The fortification of the French coastline would have been even more formidable, huge Panzer Armies would have been moved into place ready to push the invaders back into the sea - or, if that failed, then to prevent them from crossing the Rhine into Germany - and large numbers of rocket-propelled V2 missiles would have been raining down on southern England, wreaking havoc at the ports and airfields tasked to support the invading troops.

Saved lives

In the actual course of events, it took the Allied armies a year to fight their way from the French coast to Berlin; but in a scenario in which the invasion was delayed, giving Hitler more time to prepare his defences, the struggle to reach Berlin might have taken twice as long.

At a conservative estimate, each year of the fighting in Europe brought on average about seven million deaths, so the significance of Turing's contribution can be roughly quantified in terms of the number of additional lives that might have been lost if he had not achieved what he did.

If U-boat Enigma had not been broken, and the war had continued for another two to three years, a further 14 to 21 million people might have been killed.

Of course, even in a counterfactual scenario in which Turing was not able to break U-boat Enigma, the war might still have ended in 1945 because of some other occurrence, also contrary-to-fact, such as the dropping of a nuclear weapon on Berlin. Nevertheless, these colossal numbers of lives do convey a sense of the magnitude of Turing's contribution.

thank u BBC

How Alan Turing Helped Win WWII And Was Thanked With Criminal Prosecution For Being Gay

During this Memorial Day celebration, somewhere between barbecuing and beach time, give a thought to Alan Mathison Turing. You know him best as the inventor of the Turing Machine–the conceptual precursor of the modern computer–but we owe him a debt of gratitude well beyond his pioneering efforts in computer science.

During World War II, Turing served the Allied forces by breaking German military codes, particularly those used by the German navy. Germany’s naval prowess was well known and rightfully feared. German U-boats didn’t only strike terror throughout Europe, but U.S. shores were also well within the German submarines’ attack range.  During the first three months of 1942, German U-boats sank more than 100 ships off the east coast of North America, in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Caribbean Sea. Many of those ships were within site of land.

Turing was in charge of Hut 8, a section at Bletchley Park (the British World War II codebreaking station) tasked with solving encoded German naval messages. He devised a range of code-breaking tools for cracking German ciphers, including an electromagnetic device called the Bombe, which countered the infamous German Enigma machine. The Enigma machine was developed in Germany shortly after World War I to encode and decode messages, and for the next 20 years the German military refined the technology until it became the Nazis’ primary means of ciphering messages during WWII.  Enigma technology was continuously altered throughout the war, making the challenge of breaking German ciphers extremely difficult.

Without Turing’s efforts and those of his Hut 8 team, the Allies would have continued to face a severe disadvantage against the German military’s superior ciphering technology.  Though it’s impossible to quantify the exact impact of Turing’s contributions, some military historians estimate that the war would have continued for at least another two years, and two million more lives would have been lost.

The Bombe was especially crucial to the Allies’ victory in what Winston Churchill called the Battle of the Atlantic, in which German U-boats laid siege to Allied naval forces in an effort to cut off supply lines to Great Britain.  Without the ability to break German codes to determine the locations of U-boats, the Allies may very well have lost the Battle of the Atlantic, and quite possibly the war.

The Bombe code-breaking machine, via Wikipedia

After the War, Turing went on to invent and improve technologies that sparked a technological revolution he would never see.  Not only did he develop two of the first modern computers, but he also pioneered what we know today as artificial intelligence.  His 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, is considered the first cogent attempt at describing in detail how computers could one day “think”.  It’s no exaggeration to say that nearly all future developments in the field paid deference to his groundbreaking thesis.

In 1952, Turing’s home was burglarized, and a subsequent police investigation turned up evidence that Turing was having a homosexual relationship with a 19 year old man. Homosexuality was still illegal in Britain, and Turing was arrested under the same law that was used to convict Oscar Wilde in 1895. Turing was given the choice of spending a year in prison, or allowing himself to be treated with an experimental hormone to “fix” his sexual orientation — essentially a form of chemical castration. Fearing further damage to his reputation, Turing underwent the treatment. He suffered several side effects, includinggynecomastia (abnormal growth of mammary tissue).

Turing’s reputation continued to suffer after his arrest and he was permanently disqualified from government code-breaking work.  A year later, he committed suicide by taking a lethal dose of cyanide. He was only 42.

Throughout his life, Turing was known as a rare genius whose ideas were frequently ignored because so few people understood their implications. The British government took notice and realized that Turing had a great deal to offer the Allied war effort. This turned out to be a vast underestimation of what the young genius was capable of.  Indeed, it’s frightening to consider what might have happened if Alan Turing had not been working at Bletchley Park during the War.

It took nearly 60 years for Turing to receive the respect in death that he never received in life. In 2009, then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered an apology for the government’s treatment of Turing, prompted by an online petition signed by 30,000 British citizens to clear Turing’s name.

Among the many who deserve our attention this Memorial Day, Alan Turing certainly merits a place high on the list. His efforts helped save countless lives, and the free world.

thank you forbes.com

Why is Ratan Tata not in the world's richest list?

TATA Group is running 96 businesses and out of which 28 Companies are
publicly listed on the various stock exchanges.
Tata Group is world's top 50 Group according to Market capitalization
and Reputation.

Have you ever thought why Ratan Tata's name is not in the list of
billionaire's club? why Ratan Tata is not a billionaire on the Forbes
magazine list of billionaire people of the world?

The reason is that, TATA Group's 96 companies are held by its main
Company "TATA Sons" and the main owner of this TATA Sons is not Ratan
Tata but various charitable organizations developed and run by TATA
Group.

Out of which JRD TATA Trust & Sir Ratan Tata Trust are the main groups.
65% ownership of TATA Sons which is the key holding company of the
other 96 TATA Group Company is held by various charitable
organizations.

So this 65% ownership of Tata Sons Limited is not reflected
on Ratan Tata's personal Financial Statement but on the various
charitable organizations. and this is the reason why Ratan Tata is not
in the list of Billionaire club.

if we put this 65% ownership of Tata Sons in Ratan Tata’s own personal
financial statement then Ratan Tata's Net worth can become more than $
70 billion. and that's much more than the Warren Buffet's Current Net
Worth of $ 62 billion, the world's richest person according to Forbes
magazine 2008.


However, it doesn't mean that Ratan Tata is poor. In one of the interviews he
had told the reporter that, "I have my own Capital". He is the
chairman of Tata Group so obviously he earns lots of money every year
as a bonus, remuneration and salary. However, Ratan Tata's Net worth
is not $ 1 Billion.

He is not a billionaire on paper. but in reality he is the richest
person of the world. His net worth in reality is more than Bill Gates
and Warren Buffet.
So the good thing about Tata Group is that, They do Charity out of
their Money...

And that is the reason TATA Group has generated so much of Goodwill
over last 5 generations...

Corporate rivalries: the bloody wars and the bloodless-by sucheta dalal

December 12, 2000

Jamnadas Moorjani passed away last week. In the eighties, his office in a back lane of Kalbadevi used to be anadda of sorts for journalists who covered the synthetic textile industry and the savage war between Dhirubhai Ambani and Nusli Wadia.

As president of the All-India Crimpers' Association, he led a campaign by independent polyester texturisers against a duty hike on yarn, which was allegedly engineered by the Ambanis. It was natural that he soon became an ally of the Nusli Wadia-Indian Express front.

The affable Moorjani who always had a loud greeting and a fund of information, background and data on the textile industry, was one of the key dramatis personae in the bloody war which debilitated both factions. It was sometime in 1986, when he was leaving his Kalbadevi office, that he was badly injured and nearly lost an arm when a gang armed with long knives attacked him. It was widely speculated that the attack was part of the same vicious fight to the finish. But Moorjani always maintained in later years that no such link had ever been established.

There are several stories about the origin of that Dhirubhai-Nusli feud as well as the Indian Express campaign against Reliance. Some say that it was a war between old money and new money. Nusli Wadia, grandson of Mohammed Ali Jinnah on his mother's side and an impeccable centuries-old Parsi business pedigree on his father's side, was quintessential old money with all the arrogance and easy flamboyance that goes with it.

Dhirubhai's was the amazing rags-to-riches story of the "I am ready to salaam anybody" variety. From a petrol station attendant in Aden to the biggest business house in India - it was a growth marked by guts, innovation and an incredible vision that was governed more by business expediency than by ethical constraints.

Since Reliance has always depended on using the license-permit and taxes and duty structures system to its best advantage, political connections have been a vital component of its business strategy. When the political scenario turned adverse the same set of factors, which helped it grow, also brought it to its knees and is even said to have triggered off Dhirubhai Ambani's stroke in the mid-eighties.

In 1989, the arrest of a bandmaster going by the name Prince Babbaria triggered off high drama with the revelation of a plot to murder Nusli Wadia. A couple of Ambani officials were implicated, but as is typical of several notorious cases in India, this too has come to nothing.

Soon after, the two warring factions called a fragile truce, probably on the realisation that the bloody corporate battle was doing neither of their businesses any good.

Reliance regained its political clout and with Dhirubhai's sons -- Anil and Mukesh -- taking charge of the business, the empire grew exponentially. The Ambanis are not attempting to shed their upstart image and transit from "robber baron" to respectability. More recently, when the Calcutta-based Arun Bajoria threatened a hostile bid on Bombay Dyeing it triggered another step by Wadia and Ambani to bury the past. Wadia's reaction to the Bajoria bid was pure panic; he probably realised that if the Ambanis joined the battle, they could easily take over his flagship company. The Ambanis went out of their way to assure Wadia that they had no hostile designs on his company, and in the process mended a few more fences.

No other corporate war has seen this degree of bloodletting before or since. Things have certainly changed since the days when J R D Tata and G D Birla - were building their own rival empires with completely contrasting styles.

Yet, in the last two decades, the only fight that comes close to the Ambani-Wadia one was Swaraj Paul's attempt to take over H P Nanda's Escorts. It was the first major hostile bid in India, and one that gave this acquisition route a permanent stink. The brazen display of political muscle also exposed how government enforcement bodies and financial institutions would willingly malign and destroy at the instructions of their political masters. Nanda's battle also had a positive fallout, it proved that a determined industrialist can take on the might of the establishment and win.

Apart from Escorts and the Ambani-Wadia examples, other battles have revolved around hostile takeovers, especially the bids of Manu Chhabria. Only Shaw Wallace and Gammon India put up a real fight - both were "professionally managed" companies with owner-like managing directors. Chhabria acquired several companies, bled many of them dry and turned them sick - but of these two celebrated cases, he won Shaw Wallace but lost Gammon India.

The irony is that T Subba Rao, the Gammon managing director, turned to Abhijeet Rajan as a white knight and lost the company to him. It is happening all over again in Gesco Corporation, the Great Eastern Shipping real estate spin-off which faced a hostile takeover from the Delhi-based Dalmia group. The Gesco management preferred to hand over control to a loss-making Mahindra & Mahindra realty company.

Again a decision which smacks of 'people like us' (read old money) versus 'people like them' (new money). To the Sheth-Mulji management of Gesco, giving up control and sharing power with the Mahindras was preferable to losing control through a hostile bid.

Other than these examples, the closest thing to a malignant battle has been the fight between the Chhabria brothers - Manu and Kishor. Otherwise, all other rivalries have been hard but careful battles for market share. Nirma vs Surf or Procter & Gamble vs Hindustan Lever, or even the Indian chapter of the Pepsi-Coke face-off - none of them have sustained fizz or really worked up a lather.

None of this implies that all Indian industrialists are friends - if there is business there have to be business rivalries and accompanying hostilities. The difference is that it is all hidden under a veneer of affability. There are no open attacks but endless sniping at each other through deliberately planted news reports or by using the increasingly ineffectual government machinery to block permissions for new businesses.

There are dirty battles instead of open confrontation. Cloak-and-dagger instead of a showdown and malice without any drama.