Stuxnet was built to sabotage Iran nuclear plant
An industrial control security researcher in Germany who has analyzed the Stuxnet computer worm is speculating that it may have been created to sabotage a nuclear plant in Iran.
The worm, which targeted computers running Siemens software used in industrial control systems, appeared in July and was later found to have code that could be used to control plant operations remotely. Stuxnet spreads by exploiting three holes in Windows, one of which has been patched.
The high number of infections in Iran and the fact that the opening of the Bushehr nuclear plant there has been delayed led Ralph Langner to theorize that the plant was a target. Langner gave a talk on the subject at the Applied Control Solutions' Industrial Control Cyber Security conference today and published details of his code analysis on his Web site last week. As one of his data points, Langner refers to a UPI screenshot of a computer screen at the Bushehr plant running the targeted Siemens software.
