The covert cyberwar being waged in the Middle East and north Africa – particularly against Iran and its allies – is even more sophisticated and widespread than had previously been understood, according to new research.
Two leading computer security laboratories – Kaspersky Lab and Symantec – have been studying a series of powerful cyberweapons used against targets including the Iranian nuclear programme and Lebanese banks accused of laundering money for Iran and its ally Hezbollah. They are now convinced that all were probably created by a national government or governments working together.
They have also identified key similarities in the weapons' computer coding suggesting some – if not all – were worked on at different times by the same or related groups of programmers.
Suspicion over the most likely culprit has centred on the US and Israel – not least after anonymous briefings to the Washington Post by an unnamed former senior US intelligence official this year.
In June the New York Times disclosed that one of the weapons identified in the last two years – Stuxnet, a sabotage program used to attack Iran's nuclear centrifuge in 2010 – was part of a joint US-Israel cyberwar plan, codenamed Olympic Games, targeting the Islamic republic, which suggests that the other cyber weapons could be part of the same wide operation.
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