Journalists revealed new details of the cyber incident, during which the United States and Israel attacked a plant in the Iranian city of Natanz with the infamous Stuxnet malware. It turned out that Dutch intelligence was involved in this operation. The spy recruited by it brought a USB flash drive from Stuxnet to a factory in Iran.
Recalling, Stuxnet was specifically designed by experts from the United States and Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear programs.A malicious program is a computer worm whose purpose is to attack SCADA systems.
For the first time, experts applied Stuxnet in 2010, but there is reason to believe that its development began five years earlier – in 2005.
Initially, the most important question regarding the US-Israeli operation was: how did the attackers install Stuxnet in a well-protected factory in the town of Natanz.
For several years, various experts of the region expressed their assumptions. In particular, were voiced speculations about the participation of an outside spy.
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This scenario was confirmed by two journalists – Kim Zetter and Huyb Modderkolk. According to them, Stuxnet installed a spy recruited by Dutch intelligence, to whom the CIA issued an order.
The Netherlands intelligence service, known as AIVD, gained access to secret data stored in the attacked Iranian factory.
“The Dutch intelligence agency recruited an Iranian engineer, who subsequently provided all the necessary data. It was this information that helped the United States develop code for a targeted cyber attack. Further, the same recruited engineer brought the Stuxnet to the USB drive to the factory, and then installed it in the system”, – write the journalists.
Thus, the Dutch intelligence spy played a key role in the Stuxnet attack, especially regarding its delivery to the protected systems of the Iranian factory.
The covert operation, known as the Olympic Games, was designed to slow down Iran’s nuclear program and gain time to impose sanctions and engage the country in negotiations. The operation was basically a joint mission of the USA and Israel, in which the NSA, the CIA, the Mossad, the Israeli Ministry of Defense and the Israeli national unit SIGINT (equivalent to the Israeli NSA) participated. According to sources, the United States and Israel received assistance from three other countries, two of which were the Netherlands and Germany. The third is believed to be France.
According to Atlantic Monthly, Operation Olympic Games is “probably the most significant covert electronic manipulation since World War II, when cryptanalysts cracked the Enigma code“. The New Yorker claims Operation Olympic Games are “the first official act of cyber diversion in the United States against another country, apart from conventional electronic warfare systems such as those used during the 2003 Iraq invasion.”
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