WarSclerotic

Israel and Iran on brink of virus-borne confrontation | The Australian.

THE worm has turned for 21st century warfare.

AMID growing speculation about a possible Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities, evidence has emerged to suggest the two countries are on the brink of a different kind of war: one fought not with aircraft, tanks and soldiers but with cybermissiles and logic bombs.

For decades, the possibility of a cyberwar has fascinated experts. After land, sea and air engagements, battles in cyberspace could require the rewriting of military doctrines for an era in which a country could be brought to its knees by a few strokes of a laptop. That moment appears to have arrived.

According to security experts, a computer worm that has infested Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant was launched by another state. It has disrupted the production of nuclear material, proving that a cybermissile can have as much impact as an airstrike.

Like the US and Britain, two other big players on the cyber block, Israel will not say anything about the paternity of the so-called Stuxnet worm, even if its officials are privately celebrating another setback to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The Israelis have been at the forefront of international efforts to slow down President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s drive for the bomb. According to experts, Iran has now reached a point where it could build a nuclear device within a year.

The path to entry into the nuclear club is not smooth. A series of setbacks to the Iranian program had prompted suggestions of sabotage by Western intelligence agencies, including the Israeli secret service Mossad, even before news emerged of the worm.

Over the past year, the number of centrifuges enriching uranium at the nuclear plant at Natanz, in central Iran, has fallen. Last year, there were 4920, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Now there are 1000 fewer, operating at 20 per cent efficiency.

For some analysts, this is evidence that Britain, the US and Israel have succeeded in an attempt to infiltrate “bogus” equipment into the program. The US’s success in luring away Iranian scientists has also had an effect. “Operation Brain Drain” has been stepped up since last year’s elections exposed cracks in the regime, suggesting that more experts may be ready to defect, said a former CIA official.

Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s nuclear program, admitted that personnel had been lured by promises of better pay to pass secrets to the West. He claimed that better security and privileges for workers had put a stop to the spying.

At the same time, incompetence among Iranian scientists cannot have helped the nuclear cause. In the early days, those assembling the centrifuges did not wear cloth gloves. Beads of sweat were transferred to the rotors that spin inside the centrifuges and put them off balance, causing some to explode.

Economic sanctions have added to Iran’s problems in acquiring supplies. So have the seizures of illegal weapons-building material from companies dealing with Iran in the United Arab Emirates.

The Israelis hope a combination of tough sanctions weakening the regime and delays to the nuclear program may ultimately turn Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei against building a device, thus averting any need for military action. The invasion of the Stuxnet worm has added to the pressure: Iranian officials acknowledged that it caused a two-month delay in operations at the Bushehr plant in southwestern Iran, which was assembled with Russian co-operation.

Computer experts have spent months trying to trace the origin of the worm, which infects only the industrial systems made by the German company Siemens. Programmers believe it was introduced on a memory stick, possibly by a Russian firm operating in Bushehr. The same firm has projects in Asia, including India and Indonesia, which were also attacked by the virus.

European security experts have no doubt that Stuxnet was developed in a well-funded military laboratory. One estimated that it would have taken 10 specialist programmers working full-time for six months to produce the virus, which he described as “the most refined piece of malware (malicious software) ever discovered”.

A joke doing the rounds in Washington has it that the Russians launched the cyberattack to destroy reactor parts so they could sell more of them to Iran. Other experts suggest that of the new “cyberpowers”, only China and Germany can be ruled out: it would make no sense for the Germans to sabotage their own company; and the Chinese, for their part, appear to have no interest.

Britain has an advanced cyberprogram and might have been capable of pulling it off.

Ralph Langner, a German computer security expert, accuses an elite Israeli military unit of being behind the attack, saying: “It has both the capacity and the motives.”

Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be “wiped” from the map and the Israelis have frequently been portrayed as preparing for a pre-emptive strike.

Although this might delay the Iranian program for a few years, it would be likely to provoke violent retaliation from Iran and its allies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Israel acknowledges that its air defences could not prevent every missile and rocket from striking its cities, including Tel Aviv. Conflict could also throw the global economy back into chaos as oil production came under threat and prices soared.

The Israelis might regard cyberwarfare, for now, as a more promising way of pressuring Iran. But whether or not they are linked to the Stuxnet worm, they still face the danger of Iranian retaliation.

Iran is thought to have tried – with limited success – to cut computer communications between Israel’s military headquarters and field commanders in Lebanon in 2006. It was also suspected of triggering a malfunction in the computers operating Israel’s sirens last year during its attack on Gaza.

More recently, Iran is said to have set up the Iranian Cyber Army, a group of hackers with links to the Revolutionary Guard whose orders are to prepare for cyberwar.

Governments have long been aware of the hazards. Russia is widely believed to have been responsible for large-scale cyberattacks against Estonia in 2007 and Georgia in 2008 that severely disabled their communications networks. China was accused of targeting Google systems.

The emergence of Stuxnet, the first example of a virus being used successfully to sabotage industrial control systems, has alarmed some observers. A spokesman for the European Network and Information Security Agency called it a “wake-up call” for the rest of the world.

Joe Weiss, an American specialist, highlighted another concern. “Now everybody and his brother in the cyberworld is trying to get Stuxnet or a piece and reverse-engineer it. The fear I have is: what if Iran or radical Muslims . . . manage to, and start using it to attack our critical infrastructure? We have little to protect us. They could shut down all our power or water or bring trains and planes to a halt,” Weiss said.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary-general, certainly sounds worried about cyberwar. He said last week that NATO systems were being attacked “a hundred times a day” by hackers.

Additional reporting: Uzi Mahnaimi, Bojan Pancevski

The Sunday Times

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