Stuxnet Worm

Stuxnet's inability to stay stealthy may be fall-out from a failure to hit its intended targets last twelvemonth, security researchers said today.

The worm, which was planned to penetrate heavy duty industrial control computer programmers that monitor and make out factories, oil pipelines, power plants and other critical installations, only popped onto research workers' radio detection and ranging this summer, nearly a yr after it was likely first launched.

Most research workers have tallied that Stuxnet's mundanity -- they've called it "groundbreaking" -- means that it was almost certainly built by a well-financed, high powered team backed by a politics. The worm's probable aim was Iran, possibly the systems in its budding nuclear power program.

Earlier this week, Iranian officials acknowledged that tens of 1000s of Windows PCs had been infected with Stuxnet, including some in situ at a nuclear power plant life in southwestern Iran. They have denied that the attack had damaged any facilities, however, or that Stuxnet imparted to long familiar holdups in the reactor's building.

But if Stuxnet was taken aim at a specific object listing, why has it distributed to one thousands of PCs outside Iran, in countries as far discarded as China and Germany, Kazakhstan and Indonesia? .