TEHRAN - The director of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization has said that the German engineering conglomerate Siemens should be held responsible for the infection of Iranian industrial sites by the Stuxnet computer worm.

“Siemens should explain why and how it provided the enemies with the information about the codes of the SCADA software (which is used at some of Iran’s major industrial sites) and prepared the ground for a cyber attack against us,” Gholam-Reza Jalali told IRNA on Saturay.
Iranian officials should lodge a complaint against Siemens, he said.
Stuxnet is a computer worm that attacks industrial systems and spies on them and reprograms them. The worm initially spreads indiscriminately, but includes a highly specialized malware payload that is designed to target only Siemens Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems that are configured to control and monitor specific industrial processes.
In September 2010, international news agencies reported that the Stuxnet worm, which is capable of taking over power plants, had infected many industrial sites in Iran.
Later, Western sources claimed that the cyber attack had hindered Iran’s nuclear program.
Iranian officials confirmed that some Iranian industrial systems had been targeted by a cyber attack, but insisted that no crashes or serious damage to the country’s industrial computer systems had been reported and said Iranian engineers had rooted out the problem.
Iran also dismissed the claim that the cyber attack had seriously affected its nuclear program.
Experts believe that the sophisticated attack could only have been conducted with state support.
--------- U.S., Israel were involved in the cyber attack
Jalali also said that the United States and the Zionist regime were involved in the cyber attack against Iran.
“The investigations and research showed that the Stuxnet worm had been disseminated from sources in the U.S. and Israel,” he stated.
“This computer worm is first installed on a computer system and then transfers data from the infected system to the intended destination,” he explained.
He went on to say that the investigations revealed that data had been transferred to locations in the U.S. and Israel.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Jalali called on the Foreign Ministry to take legal action against the countries which organized the cyber attack against Iran.
“It was a hostile action which could have inflicted serious damage on the country if it had not been dealt with in a timely manner… So the Foreign Ministry and other relevant political and judicial organizations should lodge complaints at international courts,” he stated.
“The attacking countries should be held legally responsible for the cyber attack,” he said.
“If we were not ready to tackle the crisis and their attack was successful, the attack could have created tragic incidents at the country’s industrial sites and refineries,” he added.