Iran Nuclear Facilities ‘Under Massive Cyber Attack’

Iran believes its nuclear facilities have been hit with a “massive cyber attack” again, claiming the UK, US and Israel were behind it, according to a Reuters report.

Iran’s intelligence minister Heydar Moslehi said adequate security procedures were in place, however.

The country’s officials met with world powers in Moscow on Tuesday to discuss the Iranian nuclear programme, but failed to come up with an agreement other than to set up a technical follow-up meeting in Istanbul on 3 July.

US and Israel again?

“Based on obtained information, America and the Zionist regime (Israel) along with the MI6 planned an operation to launch a massive cyber attack against Iran’s facilities following the meeting between Iran and the P5+1 in Moscow,” Iran’s English-language Press TV quoted Heydar Moslehi as saying.

“They still seek to carry out the plan, but we have taken necessary measures.”

America and Israel have already been confirmed as the creators of Stuxnet, which broke numerous Iranian centrifuges by forcing them to overspeed in 2010, causing disruption to nuclear processes.

It is believed the two nations are behind the Flame worm as well. Earlier this week, officials with knowledge of the matter told the Washington Post the National Security Agency, the CIA and Israel’s military were all involved in the operation of the malware.

According to a recently released book, an excerpt of which was recently published in the New York Times, the US and Israel have been cooperating on a cyber-attack initiative called ‘Olympic Games’, which was started in the Bush era but continued and strengthened under Barack Obama.

It is believed the Olympic Games push was designed to disrupt Iranian nuclear capabilities, which is what Stuxnet achieved. President Obama has ordered sustained cyber attacks on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities as part of the strategy.

Russian security firm Kaspersky also believes the operators of Flame and Stuxnet cooperated at least once. If the US government was behind Flame, it would mean the nation would be guilty of bypassing security of one of its biggest companies – Microsoft.

Flame’s operators created fake Microsoft certificates to dupe users into downloading malicious software, which then helped the worm propagate.

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