(Image source: Wikipedia )

 

BY EVAN THOMAS

ANCHOR LOGAN TITTLE

 

President Obama authorized increasingly brazen cyberattacks against Iran’s nuclear program, including use of the notorious Stuxnet worm. That’s according to a report published Friday in The New York Times.

 

According to David Sanger’s report , the initiative has been underway since the Bush administration. With cooperation from Israel, it was responsible for the computer worm that targeted Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges at Natanz.

 

Stuxnet escaped onto the Internet in 2010. As Wired reported then , the worm was designed to affect only certain industrial control computers, but even with that limitation —  it spread to more than 100,000 systems worldwide.

 

Security Firm F-Secure wonders — if the U.S. government really was responsible for Stuxnet...

 

“...To whom may the antivirus industry and its affected customers send the bill for the collateral damage done?”

 

CNET reports — other countries reacted strongly when Stuxnet was discovered — but not the U.S.   

 

“...the seeming disinterest on the part of the U.S. might have been due to the fact that it created the malware. But behind closed doors, according to the Sanger's sources, Obama was wondering if the country should shut down Stuxnet...”

 

Second thoughts or not —  Stuxnet was still active . SecurityWeek quotes the report.

 

“The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium…”

 

Stuxnet isn’t the most recent security threat to grab international attention — a variant called Duqu made headlines last year, and just this week Symantec reported a new piece of malware called Flame is causing trouble in the Middle East. Geekosystem wonders if that might explain why new info about Stuxnet is coming out now .

 

“…while [Sanger’s] sources have been remarkably forthcoming, it’s hard not to think that they are willing to do so because bigger projects are afoot. After all, with Stuxnet out in the open, the worm is probably old news.”

 

Which isn’t to say it’s out of mind. The Verge points out Stuxnet could be aimed back at the U.S. at some point .

 

“The overall risk of such weapons, especially once their source code is available, is that they can be used against the US to target key infrastructure — something that Obama would clearly like to avoid.”

 

Since Stuxnet was targeted at specific kinds of systems, you’re probably safe  — unless you’re running industrial control software out of your basement.