Israel accused of launching Stuxnet attack on Iran

Photo: Islam Republic News Agency

The war of words over Stuxnet took a new turn over the weekend after a report in The New York Times claimed that the Israeli government set the worm on Iran's infrastructure with backing from the US government.

The report said that the virus was authored and tested at an Israeli nuclear testing facility known as the Dimona Complex, before being released to attack Iran's power facilities.

"To check out the worm, you have to know the machines," an American expert on nuclear intelligence told the paper. "The reason the worm has been effective is that the Israelis tried it out."

Stuxnet reportedly took down as much as 20 per cent of Iran's nuclear facilities, which The Daily Telegraph said could lead to another Chernobyl.

Iran confirmed in September that the worm had infected employee PCs at power plants, but not their operations. This is contrary to reports that suggest Stuxnet exploits four zero day vulnerabilities in order to hop from PCs to industrial systems.

Security firm Symantec said last year that Stuxnet's specific end goal was to target supervisory control and data acquisition (Scada) systems.

"It's the first threat we've seen that specifically targets industrial systems, which is why it's so serious because of the potential outcomes," said Patrick Fitzgerald, threat intelligence officer at Symantec, at the time.

Fitzgerald explained that, although the virus exploits a vulnerability to get onto Windows PCs, it merely users them as a conduit to deliver malicious payloads to its main target.

"It hops from machine to machine until it locates a machine with Scada on it, then reports via a command-and-control system to the attacker," he said.