Iran admits nuke facilities targeted by ‘Duqu’ computer virus

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Tehran, Nov 15: Iran has finally acknowledged that its nuclear facilities have been targeted by the computer virus Duqu, also called “Son of Stuxnet” by many cyber experts.

The Iranian officials, however, said that they are in the process of controlling the virus.

“We are in the initial phase of fighting the Duqu virus,” Fox News quoted Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s civil defense organization, as saying.

“The final report which says which organizations the virus has spread to and what its impacts are has not been completed yet,” he added.

Duqu is the second major weaponized virus to turn computers into lethal weapons with devastating destructive power.

The new program, discovered by Symantec in mid-October, uses much of the same code as the 2010 Stuxnet virus did.

But instead of destroying the systems it infects, Duqu secretly penetrates them and, creates “back door” vulnerabilities that can be exploited to destroy the networks at any time its creators may choose.

Roel Schouwenberg, a senior researcher with security analysis firm Kaspersky, told Computerworld that the new revelations of attacks are not the first, and that Iran described similar attacks in April and pegged them to a virus it called “stars.”

“We’re convinced, in at least one of these Duqu attacks, that the keylogger Iran identified as Stars was actually the same as the one included with Duqu,” Schouwenberg said.

The security firm blamed Iran for not sharing the Stars malware with other countries that delayed the public disclosure of the threat. (ANI)