Iran accuses Siemens over Stuxnet virus attack

[n2doc]

TEHRAN, Apr. 17, 2011 (Reuters) — An Iranian military commander has accused German engineering company Siemens of helping the United States and Israel launch a cyber attack on its nuclear facilities, Kayhan daily reported on Sunday.

Gholamreza Jalali, head of Iran's civilian defense, said the Stuxnet virus aimed at Iran's atomic program was the work of its two biggest foes and that the German company must take some of the blame.

Siemens declined to comment.

"The investigations show the source of the Stuxnet virus originated in America and the Zionist regime," Jalali was quoted as saying.

Jalali said Iran should hold Siemens responsible for the fact that its control systems used to operate complicated factory machinery -- known as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) -- had been hit by the worm.

more

http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre73g0nb-us-iran-nuclear-stuxnet/

[madokie]

1. This could get ugly

[sudopod]

2. Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

In this case, someone hard-coded a password into a Programmable Logic Controller, which has been a dumb thing to do since the beginning of programming.

There are exceptions, though. For example, this is sometimes done during debugging and testing software in order to avoid the hassle of real authentication. Perhaps the shortcut was not removed in the production version and the code audit was super-weak.

Either way, writing a program to exploit that doesn't take a wizard.

[trumad]

3. Love it

[Brother Buzz]

4. Iran pirated Siemens' doctored software and got stung

Sounds like collusion in entrapment? You bet.