Copenhagen: Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant in its latest addition revealed the identity of the person, who was responsible for the infection of the centrifuges in the Natanz Nuclear facility in central Iran close to the Holy city of Qom in 2010. The suspect was dutch engineer married to an Iranian women. The very reason, he was made use of by the stakeholder intelligence outfits like Mossad to do the needful.
The incident was the follow up by the Americans and Israeli software developers of what the revelation by the main Iranian opposition group the National Council of Resistance about the secret nuclear activities by the Iranian atomic energy establishment in February 2002. The revelation in the form of satellite images probably shared by the Maxter, a firm specializing in that kind of imagery.
That disclosure, made during the reformist administration of Syed Muhammad Khatami prompted an endless stream of IAEA investigation and inspection of the two Iranian nuclear sites; Natanz and Fardow. At one point of time, the name of late father of the Pakistani nuclear devise Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan also propped up and it caused a momentary straining of relationship between Pakistan and Iran in 2004.
The virus ‘Stuxnet’ was developed over a period of years and was delivered through the Dutch engineer through infected equipment installed in the system architecture of the nuclear facility. As per the available information, the infected equipment infected the centrifuges to the point where these machines started showing signs of overheating and then blasting open. The incident reported in 2010 during the radical administration under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was seen as a set back to the Iranian nuclear program.
The engineer; Erik van Sabben, himself also offering services to the Dutch intelligence outfit, went to Iran in 2008, and was killed in a motorcycle crash two week later in UAE. The reported incident took place after a lapse of two years, which makes the assertions of the magazine open to question; as to how the virus based on the vulnerabilities of the Microsoft windows was activated after a lapse of two years.
That incident, even now is referred in the Cyber Security circles, specially linked with corporate MIS system administrators as test case how a tiny USB can play havoc with data, if not properly screened for viruses.
