Stuxnet Was Designed To Subtly Interfere With Uranium Enrichment

ceswiedler writes "Wired is reporting that the Stuxnet worm was apparently designed to subtly interfere with uranium enrichment by periodically speeding or slowing specific frequency converter drives spinning between 807Hz and 1210Hz. The goal was not to cause a major malfunction (which would be quickly noticed), but rather to degrade the quality of the enriched uranium to the point where much of it wouldn't be useful in atomic weapons. Statistics from 2009 show that the number of enriched centrifuges operational in Iran mysteriously declined from about 4,700 to about 3,900 at around the time the worm was spreading in Iran."

Comments

Re:Resources, will, and motive

[makomk]

I doubt that you would really need that many resources to do something like this.

Aside from the problem that maxwell demon points out with the huge amount of secret internal information required, the attackers also obtained and used several zero-day vulnerabilities and driver signing certificates from two different hardware manufacturers. That's hardly trivial.

Re:Resources, will, and motive

[sigxcpu]

I concur,
Also note that whoever wrote the virus had very specific knowledge of the target.
It would only act if more than 33 devices of one of two manufacturers were linked to one controller.
It would act one way if the majority of the devices were from one manufacturer and do something else if there were from the other kind.
I would guess that someone that worked there or someone that supplied parts to the project had a major hand in this.
My guess would be that this is at least to some extent an inside job.

More details

[jimmyswimmy]

There's a lot more detail in the symantec virus "dossier". A very interesting and detailed read.