DEBKAfile has a
report on the panic and havoc in Iran's military-industrial complex that's apparently being caused by the Stuxnet worm. The story opens with this lede:
Tehran this week secretly appealed to a number of computer security experts in West and East Europe with offers of handsome fees for consultations on ways to exorcize the Stuxnet worm spreading havoc through the computer networks and administrative software of its most important industrial complexes and military command centers. Debkafile's intelligence and Iranian sources report Iran turned for outside help after local computer experts failed to remove the destructive virus.
None of the foreign experts has so far come forward because Tehran refuses to provide precise information on the sensitive centers and systems under attack and give the visiting specialists the locations where they would need to work. They were not told whether they would be called on to work outside Tehran or given access to affected sites to study how they function and how the malworm managed to disable them.
The Iranians seem to be desperate and helpless to stop the worm's ravages. It's not only destroying industrial machinery it's also apparently stealing classified military information. The story concludes:
While Tehran has given out several conflicting figures on the systems and networks struck by the malworm - 30,000 to 45,000 industrial units - debkafile's sources cite security experts as putting the figure much higher, in the region of millions. If this is true, then this cyber weapon attack on Iran would be the greatest ever.
This seems to me to be the international news story of the year and I'm surprised it's not getting more coverage in the press than it has.
