Very interesting stuff. Four pages worth of very interesting stuff so I'm not even going to bother cut & pasting.
Highlights:
-- Back in 2009 or so, a computer virus began appearing in various parts of the world. Despite its spread, it didn't seem to "do" anything.
-- Iran reported some "minor" issues with its nuclear facility as a result of the virus.
-- Reverse engineering showed that the virus only became active under very specific circumstances.
-- The very specific circumstances were those you'd only find in the Iranian facility. For example, it has code to send commands to 984 machines linked together.
-- The virus worked by recording a "status normal" screen and then displaying it for the Iranian technicians while it was in fact commanding the machines to spin their centrifuges at extreme speeds, damaging the delicate precision machinery.
-- A suspected 20% of the centrifuges in the enrichment facility were destroyed as a result of the attack.
-- Various sources are saying the virus attack set back Iran four or five years from being able to make a nuclear weapon. Besides the wasted time and repairs, it is difficult for Iran to get the materials needed due to embargoes.
-- Israel and the United States, according to various sources, were the source for the virus; collaborating so far as to involve Oak Ridge, Idaho National Laboratory and the Israeli Dimona facility where replicas of the Iranian facility were constructed and tested to see how effective the worm could be. Siemens, a German company which manufactured the centrifuge controllers, is also suspected of collaborating with the US/Israel to find exploitable weaknesses.
-- Israel is also suspected of assassinating several Iranian nuclear scientists.
Interesting stuff. Better than an air or missile strike on the facility? Who knows.