Business · Wired
Newly Deciphered Sabotage Malware May Have Targeted Iran’s Nuclear Program—and Predates Stuxnet
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In the history of state-sponsored hacking, the spectrum of cyber operations bent on sabotage have ranged from crude “wiper” attacks that destroy data on target computers to the legendary Stuxnet, a piece of malware the US and Israel first deployed in Iran in 2007 to silently accelerate the spinning of nuclear enrichment centrifuges until they destroyed themselves.
Key facts
- Among all those possibilities, Kamluk and Guerrero-Saade point to evidence for one theory in particular: LS-DYNA was also used by Iranian scientists carrying out research that may have contributed
- It's not beyond the pale that what they're looking at is an early predecessor to Olympic Games
- It focuses on making slight alterations to these calculations so that they lead to failures—subtle ones, perhaps not immediately apparent
- Systems might wear out faster, collapse, or crash, and scientific research could yield incorrect conclusions, potentially causing serious harm,” says Kamluk, who along with Guerrero-Saade
Summary
“It focuses on making slight alterations to these calculations so that they lead to failures—subtle ones, perhaps not immediately apparent. In their analysis of Fast16, Kamluk and Guerrero-Saade found three potential types of physical simulation software that the malware might have been designed to tamper with: Modelo Hidrodinâmico (or MOHID) software created by Portuguese developers for modeling water systems; Chinese construction engineering software known as PKPM; and, perhaps most significantly, the physical simulation software LS-DYNA, an application originally created by scientists who had worked at US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is now used in modeling everything from collisions between birds and airplanes to the tensile strength of crane components.