Researchers have uncovered a never-before-seen version of Stuxnet. The discovery sheds new light on the evolution of the powerful cyberweapon that made history when it successfully sabotaged an Iranian uranium-enrichment facility in 2009.
Federal investigators in the US are tightening the screws on former senior government officials who might have leaked info about the Stuxnet worm, according to The Washington Post.
Last June, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. started the inquiry into loose lips.
Chevron becomes the first U.S. company to confirm a network hit by the Stuxnet virus, an incident that reportedly occurred back in 2010 when the malware – designed to interfere with critical infrastructure operations – was discovered.
CIO Journal, Wall Street Journal's tech news service, broke the news Thursday afternoon, and interviewed Mark Koelmel, the oil giant's general manager of the earth sciences department.
An expert has challenged a top theory on how the infamous Stuxnet worm, best known for knackering Iranian lab equipment, somehow escaped into the wild.
New York Times journalist David Sanger wrote what's become the definitive account of how Stuxnet was jointly developed by a US-Israeli team. The sophisticated malware was deployed to sabotage high-speed centrifuges at Iran's nuclear fuel processing plant by infecting and commandeering the site's control systems.
Researchers have come across another sophisticated piece of Middle Eastern-targeted espionage malware, which, at the very least, is capable of stealing bank login details, and, at the most extreme, is another Stuxnet.
Delegates at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas are sharply split on the merits (or otherwise) of malware like Stuxnet that can be used offensively to take down infrastructure.
Stuxnet was the first malware that was publicly acknowledged to have been designed to take down physical equipment – in this case, Siemens supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. According to recent reports it was developed by the US and Israel as part of Operation Olympic Games, a malware program started by former President Bush and expanded by the current administration.
Security researchers said Tuesday they have come across a new strain of espionage malware that has successfully infected 800 different organizations this year in the Middle East to steal information and spy on communications.
The Flame cyber-attack that targeted computers across the Middle East has been linked to the Stuxnet worm, which is believed to have been orchestrated by the US and Israel to attack Iranian nuclear centres.
Speaking at the Reuters Global Media and Technology Summit on 11 June, Eugene Kaspersky, chief executive of the Russian security firm that bears his name and which discovered the Flame virus in May, said his team of researchers have found that Flame shares an almost identical piece of code with a 2009 version of Stuxnet.
When Kaspersky Labs analysed the Duqu Trojan early last month, they were stumped by a block of code that appeared to be previously unseen programming language. It seems now that the language was not new, but rather an old one. A custom object oriented C framework compiled with MSVC 2008 including options to minimise size and expand only when activated in line.
The Duqu malware that targeted industrial manufacturers around the world contains so many advanced features that it could only have been developed by a team of highly skilled programmers who worked full time, security researchers say.
