| We'll be the judge of that... |
| For now... |
| What about the four or five similar viruses they recently discovered had been floating around for a while? Have those also been neutralized and purged? Have they yet determined how the darned things got in to secure, hidden facilities? |
Many experts believe that Israel, possibly with assistance from the United States, was responsible for creating and deploying Stuxnet. But no authoritative account of who invented Stuxnet or how it got into Iran's centrifuge control equipment has surfaced.
U.S. and European officials, who insisted on anonymity when discussing a highly sensitive subject, said their governments' experts agreed that the Iranians had succeeded in disabling Stuxnet and getting it out of their machinery.
| How can that be determined without examining every single machine, access to which the US and European experts most certainly did not get? |
| They don't know who created it or how it got into Iranian equipment, but they're certain the Iranians have fixed it. Right... |
"If Iran would not have gotten rid of Stuxnet by now (or even months ago), that would indicate that they were complete idiots," said German computer security consultant Ralph Langner. Langner is regarded as the first Western expert to identify the ultra-complex worm and conclude that it was specifically targeted toward equipment controlling Iranian nuclear centrifuges.
Peter Sommer, a computer security expert based in Britain, said that once Iran had detected the presence of the worm and figured out how it worked, it shouldn't have been too hard for them to disable it. "Once you know that it's there it's not that difficult to reverse engineer... Neutralization of Stuxnet, once its operation is understood, would not be that difficult as it was precisely engineered to disrupt a specific item of machinery.
"Once Stuxnet's signature is identified it can be eliminated from a system," Sommer added.
Private experts say that however well-crafted the original Stuxnet was, whoever created it probably would have to be even more clever if they want to try to supplant it with new cyber-weapons directed at Iran's nuclear program.
"Aspects of Stuxnet could be re-used, but it is important to understand that its success depended not only on 'clever coding' but also required a great deal of specific intelligence and testing. It was the first known highly-targeted cyber-weapon, as opposed to more usual cyber weapons which are more diffuse in their targeting," Sommer said.
David Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector who has extensively investigated Iran's nuclear program for the private Institute for Science and International Security, which he leads, said that spy agencies would have to go back to the drawing board if they're intent on continuing to try to hobble Iran's nuclear program via cyber-warfare.
"I would assume that once Iran learned of Stuxnet, then intelligence agencies looked at this method of cyber attack as compromised regardless of how long it has taken Iran to neutralize it. It is a cat and mouse game."
But Albright added that "intelligence agencies have likely been looking at more advanced forms of attack for a couple of years that they hope will catch the Iranians unprepared."