After Hitting Iran Hard Stuxnet Attacks Kazakhstan and Russia

Kaspersky Lab reports that the number of hosts infected with Stuxnet in Iran has been slowly decreasing since July, but has spiked in Kazakhstan and Russia this month.

The Stuxnet industrial espionage worm has been in the news a lot recently. Considered by many as the most sophisticated malware of all time, people are still speculating around its purpose.

The worm was discovered back in June, but antivirus experts estimate that it has been active in the wild for several months prior to that.

In fact, with digitally signed components and propagation routines that exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities in Windows, it's not surprising that it managed to fly under the radar for so long.

At the time of its discovery Iran was amongst the most affected countries in the world, which led people to speculate that the worm was created by a nation state to target the Bushehr nuclear plant.

However, it wasn't Iran that had the biggest number of infections, but India or Indonesia, according to which vendor statistics we look at.

Heise Media reports that according to a local IT expert, who works for Ministry for Industries and Mines, as many as 30,000 computers from industrial facilities are affected.

The head of the Bushehr nuclear plant, that is supposed to go operational soon, also confirmed infections, but said that all of them were on general purpose computers and not critical systems.

Statistics released by Kaspersky on Saturday suggest that the number of Stuxnet infections in Iran has been decreasing since July. Over the past three months, it has dropped by 75%, placing the country in the fifth position at this time.

The same data shows a huge spike of 1711% for Stuxnet infections in Kazakhstan, which pushed the country in third position after India and Indonesia, still the most affected ones.

Russia has also seen a significant rise of 308% and is now in forth place. Bangladesh has seen an increase of 370% compared to August, but the overall number does not qualify it for top five.