Iranian Cyber War Continues: First Stuxnet, Now Stars, and Then Stripes?
The saga about the cyber war against the Iranian nuclear program continues thanks to the commander of Iranian Civil Defense Gholamreza Jalali. Only this time it wasn't all about the computer worm Stuxnet. In Jalali's recent statement the new action figure was introduced to the public '" computer virus Stars. After the brief introduction the story about Stars was presented in a very traditional way. As you probably already guessed, Stars was completely removed from the infected computers, locked up in a lab, scrutinized by Iranian scientists, and the USA and Israel were blamed for the second cyber attack. Everything sounded very convincing, except certain minor details. Let's take a closer look.
On April 25, 2011 Gholamreza Jalali announced that Iran was targeted by a computer virus Stars. According to Reuters quotation Jalali said, "Fortunately, our young experts [or "scientists" in another translation] have been able to discover this virus and the Stars virus is now in the laboratory for more investigations -- The particular characteristics of the Stars virus have been discovered. The virus is congruous and harmonious with the [computer] system and in the initial phase it does minor damage and might be mistaken for some executive files of government organizations."
The Stars virus description sounded familiar and had many similarities with the Stuxnet computer worm. Stuxnet used to make itself an undetectable and non-removable part of software (or let's say "congruous and harmonious"). Stuxnet was harmless before it found the right computer (how about "in the initial phase it does minor damage"). Stuxnet pretended to be a legitimate software update (or in other words "might be mistaken for -- "). Does it mean that the Stars virus is a previously unknown version of Stuxnet?
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