Researchers Say Flame and Stuxnet Share Common Authors

Trailrunner7 writes "Researchers digging through the code of the recently discovered Flame worm say they have come across a wealth of evidence that suggests Flame and the now-famous Stuxnet worm share a common origin. Researchers from Kaspersky Lab say that a critical module that the Flame worm used to spread is identical to a module used by Stuxnet.a, an early variant of the Stuxnet worm that began circulating in 2009, more than a year before a later variant of the worm was discovered by antivirus researchers at the Belarussian firm VirusBlokAda. The claims are the most direct, to date, that link the Flame malware, which attacked Iranian oil facilities, with Stuxnet, which is believed to have targeted Iran's uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz. If true, they suggest a widespread and multi-year campaign of offensive cyber attacks against multiple targets within that country."

Re:Yeah, no shit

[jandrese]

Slowing them down is more than the UN, NATO, economic sanctions, political posturing, or anything else has done. Slow down the program enough and maybe there will be time for political reform to bubble up from the bottom. The last elections in Iran drew a lot of anger from the populace, we can only hope that the latent anger eventually boils over and goes full Egypt given enough time. Direct military intervention (regime change) is just not practical, so you do what you can. Anything we can do to hold back the day when Jerusalem is a radioactive crater is a win in my book. Sure it's possible, and maybe even likely, that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was just blowing smoke with his promises to wipe Israel off of the map, but it's a big gamble when you're talking about the lives of 7.5 million people are on the line.

Re:Yeah, no shit

[ShanghaiBill]

Didn't the US do this to the Soviets during the cold war too? Something embedded into the hardware sold to the Russians that messed up a factory or plant for nuclear power/weapons?

Supposedly the CIA put a bug in some gas pipeline SCADA software that caused a major explosion in Siberia. There is some doubt about whether this really happened. More info here: Siberian Pipeline Sabotage [wikipedia.org].