Iran claims to have fended off a Stuxnet-like attack on its telecom infrastructure

Gholamreza Jalali, Iran’s chief of the National Passive Defence Organisation (NPDO), claims that his country fended off a Stuxnet-like attack targeting the country’s telecom infrastructure. Iran’s Telecommunications minister Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi has since accused Israel of orchestrating the attack. Stuxnet, which was uncovered in 2010, was a worm that specifically targeted the hardware powering Iran’s nuclear program, decimating it. The worm went after the computer systems managing Iran’s centrifuges, literally forcing them to spin to their destruction. The worm infected Windows PCs and then looked for a specific Siemens program for managing the centrifuges. Stuxnet would then infect the software and the hardware. While it’s never officially been acknowledged, the worm is widely believed to have been spread by the US and Israeli intelligence services. Jahromi issued a statement to Iranian news services in which he mentioned that the attackers returned “empty-handed.” He also promised that more details of the attack would be made public soon. ArsTechnica reports Jahromi as saying that Iran would sue Israel over the alleged attack, and the US over the reinstatement of sanctions. This, he says, will happen via the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations. According to The Jerusalem Post, Iran claimed that the Iranian President’s phone had been tapped and that he was now getting a more secure device. [caption id=“attachment_5512191” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Hackers are allegedly targeting Iran’s telecom infrastructure with a Stuxnet-like worm.[/caption]