Ken Hagler's Radio Weblog
Computers, freedom, and anything else that comes to mind.










Monday, November 14, 2005
 

Cold War Software Bugs.

Here's a report that the CIA slipped software bugs to the Soviets in the 1980s:

In January 1982, President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian natural gas pipeline, according to a new memoir by a Reagan White House official.

A CIA article from 1996 also describes this.

EDITED TO ADD (11/14): Marcus Ranum wrote about this.

[Schneier on Security]

The report mentions that:

"The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space," he recalls, adding that U.S. satellites picked up the explosion.

A claim like this makes me doubt the validity of the story. The St. Helens explosion of 1980 was seen from space, and that was about 350 megatons. Are we really expected to believe that a natural gas explosion was bigger than that?

And that's if we assume that the author meant "seen from space by Humans, which rules out all the really big non-nuclear explosions. We can tell that it couldn't have been as big as the largest Yellowstone explosion, for example, because the world didn't end in 1982.
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