LONDON An anti-virus firm says the cyberweapon that targeted an Iranian nuclear plant is older than previously believed, a finding that may shed more light on a mysterious series of attacks attributed by security experts to U.S. and Israeli intelligence.
The Stuxnet worm, which experts believe damaged or destroyed centrifuges at Iran's Natanz plant in about 2009, revolutionized the cybersecurity field because it was the first known computer attack specifically tailored to cause real-world damage.
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As "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft reported last year, Stuxnet was incredibly complicated and sophisticated, beyond the cutting edge. By the time it was first detected in June 2010, it had been out in the wild for a year without drawing anyone's attention, and seemed to spread by way of USB thumb drives, not over the Internet.
By the fall of 2010, the consensus was that Iran's top secret uranium enrichment plant at Natanz was the target and that Stuxnet was a carefully constructed weapon designed to be carried into the plant on a corrupted laptop or thumb drive, then infect the system, disguise its presence, move through the network, changing computer code and subtly alter the speed of the centrifuges without the Iranians ever noticing, Kroft reported.
"Stuxnet's entire purpose is to control centrifuges," Liam O Murchu, an operations manager for Symantec, told Kroft. "To make centrifuges speed up past what they're meant to spin at and to damage them. Certainly it would damage the uranium enrichment facility and they would need to be replaced."
Previously the earliest samples of Stuxnet dated from 2009, but Symantec's new findings push the timeline back.
The company said late Tuesday it found a primitive version of the worm dating back to November 2007 and that one element of the program dates to late 2005.
U.S. and Israeli officials have declined to comment on the attacks.
Anti-virus firm makes new revelation on Stuxnet
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Anti-virus firm makes new revelation on Stuxnet
