14 DAY TRIAL // Citing military and intelligence sources, the New York Times reports that Stuxnet was tested at Israel's highly guarded Dimona complex, which is believed to house the country's undeclared nuclear arms program.
According to the publication, Israel has installed cascades of P-1 uranium enrichment centrifuges at Dimona, to mimic the ones used in Iran's Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP).
This facility was used as a testing ground for solutions to set back Iran's capability of building a nuclear weapon.
One of them was allegedly the notorious Stuxnet worm, which sources claim was a joint Israeli - American venture.
Discovered in June last year, Stuxnet is believed to have been in operation since at least mid-2009. It is widely considered by malware researchers as the most sophisticated threat of all times.
The complexity of its code suggests that it was built by a professional team of programmers with deep knowledge of industrial control systems and not some cyber criminal gang.
Experts initially suspected that Stuxnet was an attempt to delay the launch of Iran's nuclear plant at Bushehr, but the country's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, revealed in November that a cyberattack affected its fuel enrichment program at Natanz.
"They were able to create problems on a limited basis for some of our centrifuges by software installed in electronic equipment," he said, but stressed that "our specialists stopped that and they will not be able to do it again."
Then, in December, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) released a report suggesting that Stuxnet was responsible for as many as 1,000 broken centrifuges at Natanz.
"Iran’s IR-1 centrifuges often break, yet this level of breakage exceeded expectations and occurred during an extended period of relatively poor centrifuge performance," the institute said.
Stuxnet is designed to push the speed of high frequency converters used in such centrifuges to near their breaking point. Meanwhile, it modifies sensors to hide the sabotage.
Israel, which has been very vocal about Iran being close to reaching nuclear weapons capability, is now pretty confident that its program was set back a few years.
Retiring Mossad chief Meir Dagan said recently that technological difficulties experienced by the Iranians could have delayed the creation of a bomb until 2015. Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, Moshe Yaalon, gave similar statements in the press recently.