Facing immediate arrest, Mathis felt he had no choice but to comply and deleted the article. Then he warned other Wikipedia volunteers in France that undeleting the article could lead to legal action being taken against them.
The article was restored a short time later by another Wikipedia contributor living in Switzerland and hence outside French jurisdiction, and for a brief period of time the article became the most-read page on French Wikipedia with some 120,000 page views over a single weekend. It’s still available now, together with a version written in English.
Neither the DCRI nor the French Ministry of the Interior, the ministry responsible for the DCRI, have subsequently commented on this event.
The submachine gun
The submachine gun has been around for a long time. The precursor to the weapon was a double-barrelled Italian device known as the VP or Villar Perosa that dated from 1915 and was capable of emptying its magazine in two seconds. The VP’s design influenced the Germans who produced the first true submachine gun, the Bergmann Muskete or MP18, first issued in 1918 at the end of the First World War. The purpose of the weapon was to provide an individual soldier with much greater firepower – largely inaccurate but rapid firepower – than was possible with the rifles of the time, many of which were bolt action, making them accurate but slow to reload.
Other countries then got in on the act, with the Thompson submachine gun, better known as the Tommy gun, patented in America in 1920, while in Germany the Bergmann Model 34 and the Schmeisser 28 were produced. The Italian Beretta company manufactured the Model 38 and in Hungary the Model 43 made its appearance. All of these were essentially evolutions of and variations on the earlier designs. The Second World War brought further innovations, including the British Sten gun, the Russian PPSh M1941 and PPS M1943, the German MP38 and MP40 weapons and the American M3, commonly referred to as the grease gun because it looked remarkably like the tool used on automobiles.
After the end of hostilities, other weapons were developed, including the Israeli Uzi, named after its inventor Uziel Gal, an officer in the Israeli army who came up with the design after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, partly basing it upon an earlier weapon manufactured in Czechoslovakia. This was a compact, robust and reliable weapon that saw service around the world. Then there was the MAC-10, which fired blindingly fast and virtually silently as long as it was fitted with a suppressor, but which was so astonishingly inaccurate that most professionals regarded it as only suitable for close combat in a very confined space, such as a telephone box. The joke with the MAC-10 was that it was the only weapon you could fire inside a barn and still not manage to hit the doors, walls, floor or ceiling. The Škorpion was very much another horse from the same stable.
The rounds fired by these weapons were almost invariably low velocity cartridges, often the same rounds fired by the pistols of the day, such as the nine-millimetre Parabellum round, which limited their effective range but meant that a soldier only needed to carry one type of ammunition for both weapons. This commonality did not extend to the name: in Germany, where the weapon had essentially been invented, they were known as machine pistols, while in Britain they were referred to as machine carbines. But eventually most nations followed the example set by the Americans and called them submachine guns.
As a device for making enemy soldiers keep their heads down, the submachine gun proved to be an almost ideal weapon, within its limitations. One of these was the speed with which it could empty its magazine if the soldier firing it simply kept his finger on the trigger. Typically, after two or three seconds he would essentially be unarmed until he could insert a fresh magazine and cock the weapon.
When Mikhail Kalashnikov designed the assault rifle that bears his name in 1947, the Avtomat Kalashnikova 47 or AK47 which is the commonest weapon of this type in the world, he was very aware of this problem. To tackle it, he fitted a three position catch on the right-hand side of the assault rifle. Fully up meant the safety catch was engaged, while fully down switched to semiautomatic fire, one round being discharged every time the trigger was pulled, and fully automatic was the mid position. His reasoning was simple and effective: if a soldier was suddenly fired upon, his immediate reaction would be to arm the weapon, and he would probably push the firing lever all the way down, then aim it and pull the trigger. If that had been the fully automatic setting, the magazine would be emptied almost immediately, but by making it the semiautomatic selection, the soldier would be able to fire a single shot towards the enemy, and then take his time over the next shot.
Stuxnet
In 2010, two computer security experts named Eric Chien and Liam O Murchu who worked for Symantec detected a brand-new computer virus that became known as Stuxnet. Most viruses do one of two things. They either do temporary or permanent damage to an infected computer by deleting files, or they attempt to steal sensitive information, like credit card numbers and bank account details.
Stuxnet was different because it did neither. It contained a thing known as a zero-day exploit, which is a flaw in the operating system coding that nobody is aware of. In the version of Windows available in 2010, there were twelve zero-days, and Stuxnet exploited four of them. That was unusual enough, because it implied that whoever created the virus was far more accomplished than most virus writers, but there was more. The virus was very small and extremely tightly written, with no redundant code at all. It was also written in an extremely unfamiliar programming language, a language designed to control things called PLCs, Programmable Logic Controllers. These are small computers that control machinery used in factories.
The way the virus worked was also unusual. When it infected a new computer, it searched for a PLC attached to it, and would then fingerprint the PLC and only take action if it found one particular model that was itself connected to the right type of machinery. When it found the correct PLC, the virus copied itself into the controlling software and then did nothing apart from monitor the equipment that the PLC was controlling to establish the working parameters of the machinery. It looked to Chien and O Murchu like some kind of industrial espionage.
They were wrong. They discovered that every time the virus infected a computer system, it confirmed the location of that computer to an anonymous server, if an Internet connection existed. They also discovered that every computer the virus had infected was located in Iran. That rang immediate alarm bells, because Iran was believed to be trying to manufacture nuclear weapons, and it looked as if Stuxnet was attacking some part of that programme.
This was confirmed in November 2010, when they were contacted by a man in Holland who specialised in communication protocols for PLCs. He told them that all equipment controlled by PLCs had a specific ID number, and there was a catalogue available where those numbers could be checked. So they did, and discovered that all the devices attached to the infected PLCs were frequency converters, devices that changed the speed at which machinery ran. They also discovered that these particular frequency converters were highly specific. They controlled the speed of centrifuges in nuclear facilities.
Centrifuges are a vital part of the manufacturing process needed to produce nuclear weapons and are used to enrich the uranium needed for the warhead. By correlating this data with information from other sources, they discovered that all these PLCs were located in a single nuclear plant in Iran, the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant.
They then found out exactly what Stuxnet was designed to do. The program launched one of two alternative attacks. The first of these increased the frequency of the centrifuges to over 1400 Hertz, which caused the aluminium tubes inside the centrifuges to vibrate uncontrollably and then shatter. The second attack did the exact opposite, reducing the speed to only two Hertz, which caused such a huge imbalance in the units that they also failed. But while this was going on, the Stuxnet virus had a couple of further refinements.
First, it took over the operating system display screens, where workers at the plant monitored the state of t
he centrifuges, and it played back the data which it had patiently collected while it had been monitoring the equipment and the centrifuges had been running normally. So as far as the operators were concerned, everything would have appeared normal. And then, when the centrifuges started falling to pieces and it was quite obvious that things had gone wrong, it also intercepted the shutdown signal before it could be sent to the centrifuges, so the attack and the damage continued until the entire system could be powered down.
The total extent of the damage has never been publicly admitted, but Western intelligence sources are satisfied that Stuxnet destroyed at least 1000 expensive centrifuges and would have set back Iran’s secret plan to develop nuclear weapons by about two years.
The other interesting aspect of this particular attack was that the Iranian nuclear facility was a highly secure environment and was not connected to the Internet, the usual route used by viruses to spread. That means it was either introduced by a spy, somebody who worked at the plant and who was suborned by Western intelligence, or simply by accident, by somebody acquiring a USB stick or a CD and running it on a computer attached to the system. That aspect of the attack has never been clarified.
The obvious question to ask is who built Stuxnet. Again, this has never been admitted, but it was almost certainly America, with the assistance of the Israelis, and it was the world’s first genuine and effective cyberweapon.
But one of the problems with creating this kind of virus is that it can escape from the target location, and that’s what Stuxnet has done. It has now been found outside Iran, and the best estimates suggest that it’s infected over 100,000 computers. Of course, unless you’re building a nuclear weapon, it is unlikely to do any damage to your computer. Or not yet, anyway. The danger is that the virus could be employed by another group of hackers and re-engineered to attack an entirely different target.
Sometimes, even the best-intentioned actions can have entirely unforeseen consequences. Now that Stuxnet is out in the wild, there is no telling what it might eventually do.
You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Canelo
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
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Copyright © James Barrington, 2019
The moral right of James Barrington to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781911420514
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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