Stuxnet Cyber-Missile: the hidden face of modern warfare.

The Stuxnet worm is malign software designed to infect and disrupt industrial-control systems.

The unusual complexity involved in its creation suggests it is the work of a team of well-funded experts, most probably with the backing of a national government.

The worm, transmitted via USB memory stick, is specially designed to target a particular configuration of a particular type of industrial-control system. So while traces of the virus were found in Indonesia, India, and the US, 60% of the computers attacked were in
Iran.

The ability to home-in on a specific target gives the virus the title ‘cyber-missile’. Computer warfare is specific, deniable, and very difficult to trace.

The limitation of such warfare is that it only delays progress. A cyber attack takes weeks to recover from, a physical attack takes years.

Also in the nature of a cyber attack is its ambiguity: it can be hard to tell whether an attack has been successful, or indeed, has happened at all.

The Iranian Telecommunications Minister, Reza Taqipour, admitted the virus had infected computers at the power plant in Bushehr, but that it had not caused ‘serious damage to governmental systems’.

Speculators think the real target may have been the centrifuges at the nuclear refinery at Natanz.

Regardless, the Stuxnet virus has shown the capabilities of the West to disrupt Iran’s controversial nuclear programme without exerting physical force.

The Nuclear Chief (and Vice President) denied the delay in the opening of Iran’s first nuclear power plant was due to Stuxnet. He placed the blame on a ‘small leak’ instead.

But the veracity of ministerial statements is often harder to trace than even the most complex of cyber-missiles.

Researchers at Symantec speculate the origin of Stuxnet to be Israel, due to obscure references hidden in the soft-ware coding.

For example, a reference to the date May 9, 1979, which was the day on which a prominent Iranian Jew, Habib Elghanian, was executed by the new Islamic government shortly after the revolution.

Although others say this explanation bares all the hallmarks of a pseudo-Nostrodamus conspiracy theory. Why would the authors of such a sophisticated virus leave clues and allow it to attract such attention?




N.B.
Faulty parts (by James Blitz of the Financial Times 22/07/2010)

Perhaps the best-known of the alleged attempts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear programme came in 2006, when power supplies at the enrichment facility in Natanz blew up.

The blast destroyed no fewer than 50 centrifuges. Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, then head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation, said later that the equipment had been “manipulated”.

There have been other examples. A Swiss company that provided Iran with spare parts for its enrichment programme is reported to have been persuaded by the CIA to introduce defective elements. In 2004, the New York Times reported that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency stumbled upon vacuum pumps at Natanz that had been cleverly damaged so they did not work properly.

In June 2008, an Iranian businessman was sentenced to death for allegedly supplying defective equipment to the nuclear programme. No details were given of what the equipment was. But an Iranian counter-intelligence official said the incident did irreversible damage.