Additional Clues Emerge that Creation of Stuxnet Was for Striking Iran

According to Symantec the security company, which gathered fresh data from innumerable Stuxnet samples, when cyber-criminals attacked Iran's nuclear refining plant they also dangerously aimed at 5 organizations within the region, hitting no less than ten times, thus published InfoWorld in news on February 22, 2011.

Stated researcher Liam O'Murchu of Symantec, the data enabled the company's investigators to track down the Stuxnet worm's route via various organizations' PCs. Consequently, they concluded that the original purpose of Stuxnet was to strike down the nuclear processing plants in Iran, Murchu noted. InfoWorld published this.

Murchu further said that each of the organizations the security company's researchers studied were located in Iran, adding that the first time they examined Stuxnet they observed that 60%-70% of contaminations occurred in Iran although it lacked solid evidence.

Further, Symantec reports that almost 3,300 Stuxnet samples are joined in a sequence to make the infection route of the virus via over 12,000 PCs. Every Stuxnet program creates a particular file of information taken from every PC its payload infects, including when the infection was done, names of the PC and domain as well as the external and internal Internet Protocol addresses.

Notably, Stuxnet, it seems, consisted of 2 vital components. The first, created for making all controls over the nuclear centrifuges of Iran collapse. The second to surreptitiously record the appearance of the nuclear facility's normal operations followed with reverse engineering those recordings to the facility's operators similar to some previously recorded security tape during any attack against a bank, only to make it seem that all operations were happening as normal although the centrifuges in reality were getting wildly destroyed.

Additionally, Symantec reports that the Stuxnet proliferated through the plugging of USB sticks into the systems of 4 Iranian organizations.

Nonetheless, very recently, Anonymous a hacker activist syndicate asserted that it possessed the code for a same type of Stuxnet, which some said was a highly advanced cyber-weapon. Indeed, as per Russian diplomats, a successful deployment of the virus on Bushehr could have caused a "fresh Chernobyl," so published The National in news on February 22, 2011.

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» SPAMfighter News - 3/4/2011