Saturday, July 23, 2011

Iran accuses Siemens to help launch Stuxnet cyber-attacks

Iran's Bushehr nuclear plantBushehr nuclear power plant, which was directed by Stuxnet. Iran claims Siemens helped the United States and Israel to implement it. Photo: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images

Iran has accused the German engineering company Siemens to Israel and help the United States launching a computer worm, designed to sabotage its nuclear installations.

A senior Iranian military commander said that the company facilitated the Stuxnet worm cyber-attack against Iran by providing Washington and Jerusalem with information about a Siemens-designed control system, SCADA, used in Iran's nuclear sites.

"Our Executive officials should legal follow up on cases of Siemens SCADA software, which prepares the worm Stuxnet Earth," was Iran's Gholamreza Jalali, civil defence Chief cited by IRNA State News Agency as saying.

"Siemens should explain why and how it provided information on the codes SCADA software enemies and prepared a cyber attack on us soil," he added.

Iran played down the impact of the originally malware after its first appeared in July 2010, but in November of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad admitted that the nuclear program had been affected. However, he said that the questions which had been resolved without any serious damage.

According to Jalali, an internal investigation revealed that the worm had been disseminated from sources in the United States and Israel.

"It was a hostile action, which could have caused serious damage to the country, if it had not dealt with in a timely manner," he said. Last year, assigned to Iran, a group of experts to combat the worm computer.

Both the United States and Israel, which are reported to carry out covert operations against Iran's nuclear program, has denied computer experts claim that they were behind the development of the worm Stuxnet.

New York Times reported in January that the intelligence services in both countries cooperated in a joint project to develop a malware that targeted the industrial management software that Iran uses to run its centrifuges.

In March, Ralph Langner, told a leading expert in security, a Conference in California, in his opinion the isrælske intelligence service Mossad, was involved, but that "there is only one leading source, and it is the United States."

Siemens did not respond to the Guardian request Sunday to a conversation over Iran's allegations of its involvement in the development of malware.

Last year, with the exception of worm Stuxnet Iran's nuclear programme suffered from the murder of three of its scientists in action, some analysts claimed can be a part of the conversion results in the war against Iran.

Siemens was also caught in another row involving Iran when imprisoned Iranian activist filed a suit against the company and its joint venture with Nokia, NSN, August 2010 over allegations that they have given Iran's State-run telecommunications company with a monitoring systemIt has used to spy on its opposition.


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