\'Iranian acting for Israel\' planted Stuxnet virus

The Stuxnet virus was reportedly planted at an Iranian nuclear facility by an insider using a corrupt memory stick.

According to a report by Richard Sale at Industrial Security and safety Source, the Iranian was "an Israeli proxy" as a part of a plan to carry off the Iranian nuclear programme; it said he used a memory stick with infect the machines after "Iranian double agents" were used to focus on probably the most vulnerable spots within the system.

In October 2010, Iran's intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, said an unspecified collection of "nuclear spies" were arrested in reference to the Stuxnet.33 virus. The report said that spies inside Iran had the access, contacts, positions and technical skill to do the job.

“Given the seriousness of the impact on Iran's [nuclear] programme, we believe it took a human agent to spread the virus,” said one former US intelligence source.

The report also claimed that current and previous US intelligence sources have confirmed that Israel's intelligence agency, Mossad, was answerable for the worm's introduction to the plant's systems, with the worm believed to were put on a specially crafted USB memory stick and handed over to a Natanz worker; this worker was, by all accounts, an Iranian national belonging to a dissident group named Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), relating to Mossad.

A Symantec report said Stuxnet was distributed in all places, however the virus was so efficient that it may deliver its payload only to the designated target, and doesn't damage adjacent machines.

Sale said that during December 1991, in advance of Desert Storm, the CIA and GCHQ had experimented viruses to inject into Iraq's computers and once in place, NSA and GCHQ believed the virus would spread like a virulent cancer throughout the Iraqi Command and Control system, infecting every computer system it chanced on.