Tehran: The malicious Stuxnet computer
worm has hit 30,000 industrial computers in Iran, officials
said today, but denied the Islamic republic's first nuclear
plant at Bushehr was among those infected.
So far, Stuxnet has infected about 30,000 IP
addresses in Iran, Mahmoud Liayi, head of the information
technology council at the ministry of industries, was quoted
as saying by the government-run newspaper Iran Daily.
Stuxnet, which was publicly identified in June, was
tailored for Siemens supervisory control and data acquisition,
or SCADA, systems commonly used to manage water supplies, oil
rigs, power plants and other industrial facilities.
The worm is able to recognise a specific facility's
control network and then destroy it, according to German
computer security researcher Ralph Langner, who has been
analysing the malicious software.
Langner said he suspected Stuxnet was targetting
Bushehr nuclear power plant, where unspecified problems have
been blamed for delays in getting the facility fully
operational.
Siemens said its software has not been installed at
the plant, and an Iranian official denied the malware may have
infected nuclear facilities.
"This virus has not caused any damage to the main
systems of the Bushehr power plant," Bushehr project manager
Mahmoud Jafari said on Iran's Arabic-language Al-Alam
television network.
"All computer programmes in the plant are working
normally and have not crashed due to Stuxnet," said Jafari,
adding there was no problem with the plant's fuel supply.
The official IRNA news agency meanwhile quoted him
as saying the worm had infected some "personal computers of
the plant's personnel."
And he told Fars news agency that so far, five
versions of the malware had been detected in Iran.
PTI
First Published: Sunday, September 26, 2010, 22:21