Iran hit by secret cyber warfare

NEW YORK: The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel's never-acknowledged nuclear arms program.

Over the past two years, according to experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role - as a critical testing ground in a US-Israeli effort to undermine Iran's efforts to make a bomb of its own.

Behind Dimona's barbed wire, the experts say, Israel tested the effectiveness of the Stuxnet computer worm, a destructive program that appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of Iran's nuclear centrifuges and helped delay Tehran's ability to make its first nuclear arms.
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''To check out the worm, you have to know the machines,'' said a US expert on nuclear intelligence. ''The reason the worm has been effective is that the Israelis tried it out [on their own centrifuges].''

The operations at Dimona, as well as related efforts in the US, are among the newest and strongest clues suggesting that the virus was designed as an American-Israeli project to sabotage the Iranian program.

In recent days, the retiring chief of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, Meir Dagan, and the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, separately announced that they believed Iran's efforts had been set back by several years.

Many mysteries remain: chief among them is exactly who constructed a computer worm that appears to have several authors on several continents.

In early 2008 a German company, Siemens, co-operated with an important US national laboratory in Idaho to identify the vulnerabilities of computer controllers that US intelligence agencies have identified as key equipment in Iran's enrichment facilities.

Siemens says that program was part of routine efforts to secure its products against cyber attacks. Nonetheless, it gave the Idaho National Laboratory the chance to identify well-hidden holes in the Siemens systems that were exploited the next year by Stuxnet.

The worm itself now appears to have included two components. One was designed to send Iran's nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly out of control. Another seems right out of the movies: the program secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were tearing themselves apart.

The attacks were not fully successful. Some parts of Iran's operations ground to a halt, while others survived. Nor is it clear the attacks are over: some experts who have examined the code believe it contains the seeds for yet more versions and assaults.

Officially neither American nor Israeli officials will even utter the name of the malicious computer program.

The New York Times