If true, good. Very good. “Stuxnet: Cyber attack on Iran ‘was carried out by Western powers and Israel,'” by Christopher Williams in the Telegraph, January 21 (thanks to Banafsheh):
A British security expert has uncovered new evidence in the Stuxnet virus attack on Iran’s nuclear programme.
The Stuxnet computer virus, created to sabotage Iran’s nuclear programme, was the result of collaboration between at least one Western power and the Israeli secret service, a British cyber security expert has found.
Tom Parker, a US-based security researcher who specialises in tracing cyber attacks, has spent months analysing the Stuxnet code and has found evidence that the virus was created by two separate organisations. The hard forensic evidence supports the reported claims of intelligence sources that it was a joint, two step operation.
“It was most likely developed by a Western power, and they most likely provided it to a secondary power which completed the effort,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
The malicious software, first detected in June last year, was almost certainly designed to make damaging, surreptitious adjustments to the centrifuges used at Natanz, Iran’s uranium enrichment site. While he downplayed its impact, the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has confirmed Stuxnet set back his nuclear ambitions.
Separate investigations by US nuclear experts have discovered that Stuxnet worked by increasing the speed of uranium centrifuges to breaking point for short periods. At the same time it shut off safety monitoring systems, hoodwinking operators that all was normal….
Ensuring the virus reached Natanz would have required secret cooperation inside the Iranian nuclear programme, a field of state espionage in which Israel’s Mossad agency is acknowledged as unrivalled. Last week Iran claimed to have destroyed a network of 10 spies “linked to the Zionist regime”, a sign, at least, of the threat the regime feels from Israeli spies….