Night Blotter

Source: Need to Know PBS. Joint effort and other nations and targets In April 2011 Iranian government official Gholam Reza Jalali stated that an investigation had concluded that the United States and Israel were behind the Stuxnet attack. According to Vanity Fair, Rieger stated that three European countries’ intelligence agencies agreed that Stuxnet was a joint United States-Israel effort. The code for the Windows injector and the PLC payload differ in style, likely implying the participation of two nations. Other experts believe that a US-Israel cooperation is unlikely because “the level of trust between the two countries’ intelligence and military establishments is not high. China, Jordan, and France are other possibilities, and Siemens may have also participated. Langner also speculated that the infection may have spread from USB drives belonging to Russian contractors. On 15 July 2010, the day the worm’s existence became widely known, a distributed denial-of-service attack—almost certainly from Russia and likely related to Stuxnet—made on the servers for two leading mailing lists on industrial-systems security disabled one of the lists. Sandro Gaycken from the Free University Berlin argued that the attack on Iran was a ruse to distract from Stuxnet’s real purpose. According to him, its broad dissemination in more than 100000 industrial plants worldwide suggests a field test of a cyber weapon in different security cultures, testing their preparedness, resilience, and …