The Latest On Stuxnet

The Mullahs are stil trying to cope with the depredations of the evil Stuxnet computer worm on their illegal nuclear program,and some experts are saying it might have set them back as much as two years.

A German computer expert was quoted by the Jerusalem Post as saying, “This was nearly as effective as a military strike, but even better since there are no fatalities and no full-blown war. From a military perspective, this was a huge success.”

“It is extremely difficult to clean up installations from Stuxnet, and we know that Iran is no good in IT [information technology] security, and they are just beginning to learn what this all means,” he said. “Just to get their systems running again they have to get rid of the virus, and this will take time, and then they need to replace the equipment, and they have to rebuild the centrifuges at Natanz and possibly buy a new turbine for Bushehr.”

While I think two years is optimistic, there's no doubt this was a major setback.So who was responsible?

The Israelis are widely suspected, and as a matter of fact they do have a secret unit that's proven itself to be very effective at cyberwarfare.

The US is also a prime suspect, and as the expert the Post spoke to speculated, it might even have been a joint effort,although I doubt it.

“We can say that it must have taken several years to develop, and we arrived at this conclusion through code analysis, since the code on the control systems is 15,000 lines of code, and this is a huge amount.”

“This piece of evidence led us to conclude that this is not by a hacker,” he continued. “It had to be a country, and we can also conclude that even one nation-state would not have been able to do this on its own.”

One fact against the supposition of a joint effort is the fact that no details have leaked out yet.The Israelis are notoriously good at keeping these sort of things quiet, the Americans not so much. And as the old Sicilian saying goes, a secret is something only two people keep only when one of them is dead.

One interesting bit of speculation was forwarded tome via Joshua's Army member Dan Friedman. According to another expert, Jeffrey Carr writing at Forbes, the real culprit was the Chinese.. and he presents some pretty compelling evidence, based on several Chinese companies involved, China having access to a full Windows Source code, China having little or no evidence of Stuxnet problems even though they should have had vulnerability and the fact that the Iranian centrifuges may actually be a Chinese design.

According to Carr, the benefit for the Chinese is to keep a major oil supplier to China pumping out crude while sabotaging Iran's nuclear program to keep Israel or the US from a military attack that might interdict the oil flow to China not only from Iran but the entire Persian Gulf.

(an additonal hat tip to Joahua's Army member Louie Louie on this one)

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