punditman says...Is the Stuxnet computer worm the start of the Cyber Wars? As Iran tries to stop a mutating virus that is damaging their industrial infrastructure, punditman wonders if we are heading towards A Taste of Armageddon. Our future may well imitate science fiction.
TEHRAN - Iran suspects that a foreign organization or nation designed "Stuxnet," a quickly mutating computer worm that has been infiltrating industrial computer systems in the Islamic republic, a high-ranking official said Monday.
"We had anticipated that we could root out the virus within one to two months," Hamid Alipour, deputy head of Iran's Information Technology Co., a part of the ministry of communication and information technology, told the Islamic Republic News Agency. "But the virus is not stable, and since we started the cleanup process three new versions of it have been spreading," he said.
No one has claimed responsibility for the worm and no entity or country has been definitively identified as its source.
It is the first known case of malware designed to sabotage an industrial control system. "We've never seen anything like this before," said Liam O'Murchu, a researcher with the security firm Symantec. "It's very dangerous."
