Stuxnet proved more effective than a military strike

A German security expert has claimed that Stuxnet has caused a two year delay to the Iranian nuclear industry and was more effective than a military strike.

Ralph Langer, who has been investigating the Stuxnet malware, said it was a highly sophisticated piece of malware, far in advance of anything currently produced. He suggested it could have been invented in a combined operation between the US and Israel's Military Intelligence Unit 8200.

"We can say that it must have taken several years to develop, and we arrived at this conclusion through code analysis, since the code on the control systems is 15,000 lines of code, and this is a huge amount," Langer told the Jerusalem Post.

"This piece of evidence led us to conclude that this is not by a hacker," he continued. "It had to be a country, and we can also conclude that even one nation-state would not have been able to do this on its own."

He said Stuxnet was the most "advanced and aggressive malware in history," and said that in terms of its effect it was more effective than a military strike, such as the Israeli airstrike against Iraqi nuclear facilities in 1981.

Eric Byres, a computer security expert for Tofino Security, which provides tools for industrial companies with Stuxnet-related problems, told the paper that the number of internet users on his site identified as being from Iran had soared in recent weeks.

"What caught our attention was that last year we maybe had one or two people from Iran trying to access the secure areas on our site," Byres said.

"Iran was never on the map for us, and all of a sudden we are now getting massive numbers of people going to our website, and people who we can identify as being from Iran."

Iran has denied that it has been hurt by the Stuxnet malware, which exploits control systems in Siemens industrial control software.

16 Dec 2010