Taghipour said the government has eliminated the Stuxnet threat. He said
no major computers have collapsed.
But other officials said 30,000 computers have been damaged by Stuxnet. They
said Stuxnet might have been introduced by a foreign intelligence agency as
early as 2009.
"An electronic war has been launched against Iran," Mahmoud Liai, an
official at the Industry and Mines Ministry, said. "This computer worm is
designed to transfer data about production lines from our industrial plants
to [locations] abroad."
Iran's state-owned news agency, ISNA, reported that leading nuclear
scientists and engineers met in late September to examine the threat. ISNA
said Stuxnet, discovered by Iran in July 2010, has already harmed Iranian
industrial facilities.
Stuxnet has also been reported in India and Indonesia. On Sept. 13, the
U.S. company Microsoft warned of Stuxnet, said to employ two stolen security
certificates to penetrate Windows-operated computer networks.
"It's difficult to say with any certainty who is behind it," Rik
Ferguson, a senior security adviser at Trend Micro, told the Qatari
satellite channel A-Jazeera. "There are multiple theories, and in all
honesty, any of them could be correct."