Bushehr plant

Monday’s attack on an Israeli diplomat’s car in the heart of the capital is being seen as one of many in a series of attacks and counter-attacks by Iranian and Israeli establishments. The point of contention is Iran’s nuclear programme, which is seen by Israel as a threat. Iran hasn’t helped matters much, since its senior leaders — including the president — have publicly vowed to ‘remove’ Israel from the world map. Some would consider it incidental that the attack took place the day after the anniversary of the assassination of the military mastermind, Imad Mughniyah, in Syria — an attack blamed on the Jewish state. But others would find meaning in the choice of date.

Although Monday’s attack in New Delhi, failed attempts in Georgia and the January assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, may give the impression that the proxy war between the two countries is a recent phenomenon, in reality it all started in the cyber world in 2009-2010. Iran was using Siemens centrifuge machines to enrich uranium. These are run on supervisory control and data acquisition management systems. The systems are usually not connected to the internet for security reasons. So the Scada system at the Bushehr nuclear plant, Iran was not connected to the internet. So Stuxnet, one of the most sophisticated computer viruses, was developed as the rivalry between establishments of the two countries did not remain limited to plain rhetoric.

Centrifuge machines at the Bushehr plant were being controlled by standalone systems running Scada. This was not enough to stop the ‘hackers’ who wanted to put a spanner in Iran’s centrifuge process and thereby derail its nuclear ambitions. There is strong circumstantial evidence that the Stuxnet worm found its way into the Bushehr nuclear plant through the infected laptops of maintenance engineers. Stuxnet was so sophisticated that it already knew the path it was likely to take in order to reach the sanctum sanctorum of the uranium enriching plants.

As the story goes, maintenance engineers using Microsoft windows were the first target, and they took their infected pen drives to the plant (after a virus scan which was unable to spot Stuxnet) for running routine diagnostics on the control systems. Once inside Scada (Siemen’s software), it took control of all the systems. But, most interestingly, Stuxnet only targeted a system if it had Siemens software.

When it entered Scada, Stuxnet knew exactly what to do. It did not make the control systems go haywire or stop the machines abruptly, which may have caused suspicion. It just tweaked the controls so as to make the centrifuge yield very little without going defunct. It is said to have increased the speed in order to damage the spindle in the machines over a period of time. The centrifuge machines, during the productive period, worked so inefficiently that they hardly enriched any uranium quantity before going out of order. Commenting on the sophistication of the virus, the Russian computer security lab, Kaspersky Lab, concluded that it could only have been prepared with the support of the “nation-state”.

In a proxy war between two great nations, the rest of the world — even if geographically far removed from the conflict zone — cannot expect to be out of the picture, as we discovered to our horror on Monday and as Indonesia and other countries discovered in 2010, with their computers being infected with the Stuxnet worm. Modern technology has shrunk the whole world; all inhabitants are affected whatever be the cause of conflict and whosoever the warring parties. Since modern nations can cause destruction, the international community should come forward and resolve issues lest it is too late. Technology will continue to bring people still closer. Technology has so entwined our destinies that we may choose our destiny but not be able to separate it from that of others.