- Tehran this week secretly appealed to a number of computer
security experts in West and East Europe with offers of handsome fees for
consultations on ways to exorcize the Stuxnet worm spreading havoc through
the computer networks and administrative software of its most important
industrial complexes and military command centers. debkafile's intelligence
and Iranian sources report Iran turned for outside help after local computer
experts failed to remove the destructive virus.
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- None of the foreign experts has so far come forward because
Tehran refuses to provide precise information on the sensitive centers
and systems under attack and give the visiting specialists the locations
where they would need to work. They were not told whether they would be
called on to work outside Tehran or given access to affected sites to study
how they function and how the malworm managed to disable them. Iran also
refuses to give out data on the changes its engineers have made to imported
SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems, mostly from Germany.
- The impression debkafile sources gained Wednesday, Sept.
29 from talking to European computer experts approached for aid was that
the Iranians are getting desperate. Not only have their own attempts to
defeat the invading worm failed, but they made matters worse: The malworm
became more aggressive and returned to the attack on parts of the systems
damaged in the initial attack.
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- One expert said: "The Iranians have been forced
to realize that they would be better off not 'irritating' the invader because
it hits back with a bigger punch."
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- Looking beyond Iran's predicament, he wondered whether
the people responsible for planting Stuxnet in Iran - and apparently continuing
to offload information from its sensitive systems - have the technology
for stopping its rampage. "My impression," he said, "is
that somebody outside Iran has partial control at least on its spread.
Can this body stop malworm in its tracks or kill it? We don't have that
information at present, he said.
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- As it is, the Iranian officials who turned outside for
help were described by another of the experts they approached as alarmed
and frustrated. It has dawned on them that the trouble cannot be waved
away overnight but is around for the long haul. Finding a credible specialist
with the magic code for ridding them of the cyber enemy could take several
months. After their own attempts to defeat Stuxnet backfired, all the Iranians
can do now is to sit back and hope for the best, helpless to predict the
worm's next target and which other of their strategic industries will go
down or be robbed of its secrets next.
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- While Tehran has given out several conflicting figures
on the systems and networks struck by the malworm - 30,000 to 45,000 industrial
units - debkafile's sources cite security experts as putting the figure
much higher, in the region of millions. If this is true, then this cyber
weapon attack on Iran would be the greatest ever.
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- http://www.debka.com/article/9050/
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