Stuxnet Returns, Striking Iran with New Variant

The most critical infrastructure of Iran and its strategic networks were attached with decade old Stuxnet attack according to Reuters. Iran’s head of civil defense agency, Ghulam Raza Jalali, told the reporters that a recent discovered next generation of Stuxnet that was trying to enter the systems consisted of several parts.

In the live conference hosted on October 28, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei said, “In the face of sophisticated methods used by the enemies’ in their onslaught, the passive defense must be totally vigilant and serious.”

While the reports from the source The Times of Israel have raised a question about the attacks motivation, Israel said its intelligence agency, Mossad, had thwarted an Iranian murder plot in Denmark.

Well, on one is pointing anyone yet, “the ‘New Stuxnet’ attack is the latest indicator of the cyber war that many governments are actively engaged in,” said Broderick Perelli Harris, senior director of professional services at Venafi. “The details are still patchy, but it seems that Israeli intelligence relied on an old attack blueprint here.

“In the initial Stuxnet attack, the US and Israeli governments used stolen machine identities to infect Iranian nuclear centrifuges with the virus. Now, over 22 million pieces of malware use that blueprint to attack organizations and states alike across the world – all the signs point to the same method being used again here. It’s easy for organizations and governments to ignore when it’s used against an adversarial state, but the blueprint remains ‘in the wild’ for cyber-criminals to exploit.”

“With operators of critical national infrastructure unable to progress and update their operational technology at the same pace as their IT counterparts, there are known gaps and weaknesses that simply aren’t getting plugged. We can only hope news of this new version of Stuxnet has reached the highest level of decision making – because we’ve already seen what happens when you use old technology to fight a new adversary.”