Iran Being Attacked By Computer Virus Of Biblical Proportions?

For the past few weeks there have been reports of a computer virus attacking only computers being used to operate Iran's nuclear facilities. Iran is blaming the United States and Israel for the virus, however new information released in today's New York Times indicates that the virus may just very well be a sign from God.

You see, Computer Scientists who are analyzing the computer worm that is slowing down Iran's attempt to develop nuclear weapons may have found a file name that seemingly refers to the Biblical Queen Esther.

Deep inside the computer worm that some specialists suspect is aimed at slowing Iran's race for a nuclear weapon lies what could be a fleeting reference to the Book of Esther, the Old Testament narrative in which the Jews pre-empt a Persian plot to destroy them.

That use of the word "Myrtus" — which can be read as an allusion to Esther — to name a file inside the code is one of several murky clues that have emerged as computer experts try to trace the origin and purpose of the rogue Stuxnet program, which seeks out a specific kind of command module for industrial equipment.

In the Biblical Story of Esther, the vizier to the Persian king tries to destroy the Jewish people, in the end he is defeated by a Jewess named Esther who becomes queen of Persia and her uncle Mordecai. Since Iran is the modern day Persia, and the computer virus is meant to stop the destruction of the Jewish People, could this be a message from God, from Israel,  something put in just to confuse or maybe something put in the virus just to make the paranoid Iranians even more nervous.

Not surprisingly, the Israelis are not saying whether Stuxnet has any connection to the secretive cyberwar unit it has built inside Israel's intelligence service. Nor is the Obama administration, which while talking about cyberdefenses has also rapidly ramped up a broad covert program, inherited from the Bush administration, to undermine Iran's nuclear program. In interviews in several countries, experts in both cyberwar and nuclear enrichment technology say the Stuxnet mystery may never be solved.

There are many competing explanations for myrtus, which could simply signify myrtle, a plant important to many cultures in the region. But some security experts see the reference as a signature allusion to Esther, a clear warning in a mounting technological and psychological battle as Israel and its allies try to breach Tehran's most heavily guarded project. Others doubt the Israelis were involved and say the word could have been inserted as deliberate misinformation, to implicate Israel.

"The Iranians are already paranoid about the fact that some of their scientists have defected and several of their secret nuclear sites have been revealed," one former intelligence official who still works on Iran issues said recently. "Whatever the origin and purpose of Stuxnet, it ramps up the psychological pressure."

The Stuxnet virus attacks only a certain type of Siemens industrial control computer, the type used by

by Iran:

"What we were told by many sources," said Olli Heinonen, who retired last month as the head of inspections at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, "was that the Iranian nuclear program was acquiring this kind of equipment."

Also, starting in the summer of 2009, the Iranians began having tremendous difficulty running their centrifuges, the tall, silvery machines that spin at supersonic speed to enrich uranium — and which can explode spectacularly if they become unstable. In New York last week, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, shrugged off suggestions that the country was having trouble keeping its enrichment plants going.

There is no way to determine where the virus came from, US, Israel or some crazy hacker.  There are even reports that the virus may have come from Russia.

Ralph Langner, a German computer security consultant who was the first independent expert to assert that the malware had been "weaponized" and designed to attack the Iranian centrifuge array, argues that the Stuxnet worm could have been brought into the Iranian nuclear complex by Russian contractors.

"It would be an absolute no-brainer to leave an infected USB stick near one of these guys," he said, "and there would be more than a 50 percent chance of having him pick it up and infect his computer."

There are many reasons to suspect Israel's involvement in Stuxnet. Intelligence is the single largest section of its military and the unit devoted to signal, electronic and computer network intelligence, known as Unit 8200, is the largest group within intelligence.

Yossi Melman, who covers intelligence for the newspaper Haaretz and is at work on a book about Israeli intelligence over the past decade, said in a telephone interview that he suspected that Israel was involved.

He noted that Meir Dagan, head of Mossad, had his term extended last year partly because he was said to be involved in important projects. He added that in the past year Israeli estimates of when Iran will have a nuclear weapon had been extended to 2014.

"They seem to know something, that they have more time than originally thought," he said.

Wherever it came from, any virus that is slowing down Iran's quest for nuclear weapons is doing God's work.

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