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Saturday, September 25, 2010     INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING

'Electronic war': Iran confirms Stuxnet 'spy worm' of foreign origins has targeted nuclear sites

NICOSIA — Iran has issued conflicting reports about a deadly computer worm that has hit its nuclear sector.

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Iranian officials have confirmed reports that a malicious computer code, called Stuxnet, was spreading throughout the nation's nuclear infrastructure. But the officials have given differing accounts of the damage by Stuxnet, said to be capable of taking over computers that operate huge facilities, including nuclear energy reactors.

[Geostrategy-Direct.com reported in its new edition that the launch of the Bushehr nuclear reactor, scheduled for Sept. 2 had been delayed. Atomic Energy Organization director Ali Salehi, in a briefing on Sept. 15, did not explain the reason and raised the prospect of additional delays. He said the reactor would not reach full capacity before March 2011, but stressed that this was just an estimate.]

"The effect and damage of this spy worm in government systems is not serious," Reza Taghipour, a senior Iranian Communications Ministry official, said.


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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."



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