Cyber Attack Unleashes Most Brutal Attack Yet on Iranian Nuclear Plant: AC/DC

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There are few things as comforting to hear as, “Our nuclear program has been compromised again” from an Iranian nuclear facility, but it appears that someone behind a cyber attack, or possibly some snickering 12 year old boys in their parent’s basement, have unleashed a cyberattack on Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization; hard rock-style. That’s right, the latest Iranian nuclear cyberattack has the nuclear physicists shaking all night long to AC/DC rock music; “Thunderstruck” to be exact.

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The cyber attack affected the organization’s automation network at two facilities: Natanz and Fordo near Qom. And it appears that AC/DC alone is not weapon enough, the offending malware also forced the song to be played all night, and at full volume. News of the attack came by way of email from one of the nuclear scientists to a researcher at F-Secure, a Finnish computer security firm. The email stated: “I am writing you to inform you that our nuclear program has once again been compromised and attacked by a new worm with exploits which have shut down our automation network at Natanz and another facility Fordo near Qom.”

Some have remained skeptical as to the validity of this claim. Mikko Hypponen, one of the Finnish computer security researchers, says none of this has been confirmed and that it is odd that the alert email was sent to them by an actual nuclear scientist, rather than another computer security researcher. When Hypponen emailed the scientist back, asking for a sample of the worm for F-Secure to analyze, the scientist emailed him back saying that he could not send a sample because he’s not a computer security expert.

But as Hypponen also points out, it is unclear that researchers and scientists would have anything to gain by making up the story, and this is fresh on the heels of another computer virus that hit Iran in June, when officials discovered that a virus known as Flame, considered one of the most complext cyber attacks made to date, had quietly infected Iranian computers for two years. Some feel that this is just a follow-up to that attack.

If that is the case, it would seem that after two years of the sophisticated spyware activating microphones, cameras and keystroke recordings, the much more devastating attack is being forced to listen to AC/DC at all hours of the night.

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