Update 1, October 1, 7:09 PM:
Now, some are arguing that the worm might have been developed elsewhere – say, India – and blamed unfairly on Israel. Frankly, I don’t find this plausible.
Further links supporting the Israeli sabotage thesis include this Reuters piece describing Israel’s motives, assertions, and capabilities in regard to Iran:
HOW MIGHT ISRAEL ATTACK IRAN?
Overt or covert? Israel has been developing “cyber-war” capabilities that could disrupt Iranian industrial and military control systems. Few doubt that covert action, by Mossad agents on the ground, also features in tactics against Iran [ID:nLV83872]. An advantage of sabotage over an air strike may be deniability.
The blog warincontext has an excellent piece analyzing Israel’s motives for and ability to launch cyber attacks. It concludes that the mere evidence of Iranian vulnerability constitutes an effective blow in strategic terms, perhaps even avoiding the need for Israel to literally commit an act of sabotage.
ORIGINAL POST
Earlier we blogged about the Stuxnet worm attack on Iranian computer systems. Only a few countries had the capacity for it. Now come reports that a crack Israeli team may have been behind the worm and that its code concealed a biblical reference (hat-tip to reader DCN for telling me about Unit 8200):
“Computer experts have discovered a biblical reference embedded in the code of the computer worm that has pointed to Israel as the origin of the cyber attack.
The code contains the word “myrtus”, which is the Latin biological term for the myrtle tree. The Hebrew word for myrtle, Hadassah, was the birth name of Esther, the Jewish queen of Persia.
In the Bible, The Book of Esther tells how the queen pre-empted an attack on the country’s Jewish population and then persuaded her husband to launch an attack before being attacked themselves.
Israel has threatened to launch a pre-emptive attack on Iran’s facilities to ensure that the Islamic state does not gain the ability to threaten its existence.
Ralf Langner, a German researcher, claims that Unit 8200, the signals intelligence arm of the Israeli defence forces, perpetrated the computer virus attack by infiltrating the software into the Bushehr nuclear power station
Mr Langer said: “If you read the Bible you can make a guess.”
Computer experts have spent months tracing the origin of the Stuxnet worm, a sophisticated piece of malicious software, or malware, that has infected industrial operating systems made by the German firm Siemens across the globe.”
Read the rest of the piece at The Daily Telegraph.
What’s interesting to me is that when I was doing a little googling to find out about Stuxnet, I came across a Microsoft page on it in July 2010 that listed Iran, India, Indonesia, and the US as the only countries in the world associated with the worm.