14 DAY TRIAL // Iranian officials have come out and said that high-grade malware is not to blame for the recent fires plaguing several petrochemical plants across the nation, Tehran Times reports.
Rumors of a new Stuxnet-like attack surfaced last week, when Abolhassan Firouzabadi, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Cyberspace Council, said the nation's top cyber-security experts would investigate the possibility of new cyber-attacks from external threat actors.
The official was alluding to the infamous Stuxnet incident from 2009, when a virus developed by the NSA and one of Israel's cyber--intelligence agencies was secretly deployed against Iran's nuclear program, leading to the malfunction of hundreds of centrifuges used for nuclear material enrichment.
The Israelis' overzealousness resulted in the discovery of Stuxnet, which caused an international scandal and started the public discussion about the morality of deploying cyber-weapons on countries against which there's no active declaration of war.
Malware found but was never active
Following a week-long investigation into a large number of never-ending fires at several petrochemical plants, Iranian officials say they did not find any evidence of new Stuxnet-level malware.
Nevertheless, officials admit they found malicious software at two petrochemical complexes. Iranian investigators claim they removed the malware from the systems but also add that the malicious software did not play a part in the fires since it never became active.
According to Brigadier General Gholam-Reza Jalali, the malware was found in industrial software packages bought from "foreign countries."
While Iran has been strengthening its cyber-defensive capabilities, other countries also accused it of launching attacks of its own.
In March, the US charged seven Iranian citizens with several hacking-related crimes. The indictment said these seven ran or were employees of two IT security firms hired by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to conduct DDoS attacks on US companies.