Putting Stuxnet in a Larger Context
I've been slightly obsessed with the Stuxnet worm (see Unpacked Stuxnet Is Ugly for the Channel).
Now Newsweek has a lengthy article tying the worm together with the late November bomb attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists. In my admittedly obsessive view, the article is worth a read.
Authors Christopher Dickey, R.M. Schneiderman and Babak Dehghan Pisheh have put together a pretty good summary of the state of play. For example, one thing I missed in my Thanksgiving turkey leftover-induced haze was that on the day of the scientist bombings, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made the first Iranian government acknowledgement that a cyberattack had damaged some Iranian centrifuges.
Bottom line, nearly everything remains murky.
Key quote from Newsweek:
"What we can deduce from the limited evidence that has emerged so far, according to former White House counterterrorism and cyberwarfare adviser Richard Clarke, is that at least two countries conducted operations against Iran simultaneously and not necessarily in close coordination. One likely carried out the hits; the other created and somehow infiltrated the highly sophisticated Stuxnet worm into computers of the Iranian nuclear program."
Posted by Scott Bekker on December 14, 2010