Stuxnet infected Natanz plant via carefully selected targets rather than escape from it

Five initial victims of infamous worm named.

Today, as

Wired

journalist Kim Zetter publishes her

book


Countdown to Zero Day

on Stuxnet, researchers from

Kaspersky

and

Symantec

published blog posts that shine a light on how the malware spread to its likely target, the Natanz plant in Iran, and to hundreds of thousands of other computers.

Earlier stories had suggested that Stuxnet had somehow escaped from the plant, but because Stuxnet conveniently keeps a breadcrumb log that tracks how the worm has spreaded thus far,

Symantec

researcher Liam O’Murchu was able to

conclude

that all infections originated outside the Natanz plant.

A

blog post

by

Kapsersky

researchers explains how it came that the malware still spread so widely.

The infection started at five different companies and organisations in Iran, now named by

Kaspersky

and all closely linked to the country’s nuclear program. This helped Stuxnet reach the systems at its ultimate target, which was no trivial task, given that these systems weren’t connected to the Internet.

However, errors and design flaws caused the worm to spread from one of targeted companies, Behpajooh Co, to a large number of computers inside and outside Iran. It was this spreading that led to Stuxnet’s discovery in the summer of 2010.

Stuxnet famously was the subject of

two


presentations

during VB2010, that saw several global affairs journalists cross the ocean to attend the conference and even led to coverage at the

BBC

.

Unfortunately, in 2010 we didn’t record conference presentations, but Mikko Hyppönen (

F-Secure

) recorded Liam O’Murchu’s demonstration on how Stuxnet’s SCADA component was able to make centrifuges spin faster than intended. He demonstrated this by writing a program that blew up a balloon and then writing malicious code that modified the program so that it would continue to pump air into the balloon making it eventually explode.

A review of

Countdown to Zero Day

will appear on this website later this month.

Posted on 11 November 2014 by

Martijn Grooten