German firm employee may have created Stuxnet, Israel blamed

Well, it was only a matter of time before somebody found an “official” way to blame Israel for the Stuxnet worm. Mainly because of the fact that it has been reported as damaging quite a few computer systems in Iran. More specifically, “60,000 computers in Iran, including those at the Bushehr nuclear plant” were affected, according to a report on Friday posted at www.dailymirror.lk/. In addition, “Kevin Hogan, senior director at computer security giant Symantec, said 60 percent of computers worldwide infected by the Stuxnet worm were in Iran, suggesting its industry was the target.”

Iran, however, has been using their state run media in an attempt to convince the world that no significant damage was done by the worm. In fact, a www.presstv.ir/ claimed on Friday that India and Indonesia have been hit worse than Iran. Iran’s Chinese ally allowed their state run media to report that “almost 1,000 corporate computers in China” were affected, according to an http://news.xinhuanet.com article on Friday.

Another of Iran’s friends, India, is pushing the notion that Israel did it. According to an http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com on Friday, “A Biblical reference has been detected in the code of the computer virus that points to Israel as the origin of the cyber attack.” It’s further explained that the word “myrtus” is in the code, and that this is a “reference to the myrtle tree” Never mind that myrtle is a Middle Eastern plant and not exclusive to Israel. But because there is a Queen named Esther mentioned in the Torah whose Hebrew name of Hadassah is derived from the word “myrtle”, Israel is the guilty party. One can naturally see that the US must have helped Israel with creating the Stuxnet worm because of the fact that Esther’s story is in the Christian Bible’s Old Testament book of Esther, right?

To add further fleer to the above accusation, the above mentioned Iranian article pointed out that the worm was likely created by a “person (who) may possibly be a current or former employee of the German industrial giant (Siemens) whose control systems are widely used to manage industrial facilities such as oil rigs and power plants” (emphasis added). In addition, senior technology consultant Graham Cluley of Sophos commented that, “The message I got was that it appears to have been written by someone with inside knowledge of how Siemens’ systems work.”

Now that Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been at least interrupted, it’s likely only a matter of time before they develop their own version of Stuxnet – perhaps with the help of North Korea since they managed to shake up Washington with a cyber attack last summer.