How a secret Dutch mole aided the U.S.-Israeli Stuxnet cyberattack on Iran
The first-of-its-kind virus, designed to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, effectively launched the era of digital warfare and was unleashed some time in 2007, after Iran began installing its first batch of centrifuges at a controversial enrichment plant near the village of Natanz.
Neither the CIA nor the Mossad responded to inquiries from Yahoo News about the information. The AIVD declined to comment on its involvement in the operation. Germany contributed technical specifications and knowledge about the industrial control systems made by the German firm Siemens that were used in the Iranian plant to control the spinning centrifuges, according to sources. France is believed to have provided intelligence of a similar sort.
But during the early days of Iran’s nuclear program, AIVD’s hacking team was small and still developing. The request to the Dutch for help with this came toward the end of 2004, when a Mossad liaison working out of the Israeli Embassy in the Hague and a CIA official based at the U.S. Embassy met with a representative from AIVD. There was no talk yet about inserting a digital weapon into the control systems at Natanz; the aim at that time was still just intelligence.
Establishing a dummy company with employees, customers and records showing a history of activity, takes time, and time was in short supply. In late 2005, Iran announced it was withdrawing from the suspension agreement, and in February 2006 it began to enrich its first batch of uranium hexaflouride gas in a pilot plant in Natanz.
The second company, however, got assistance from Israel. This time, the Dutch mole, who was an engineer by training, managed to get inside Natanz by posing as a mechanic. His work didn’t involve installing the centrifuges, but it got him where he needed to be to collect configuration information about the systems there. He apparently returned to Natanz a few times over the course of some months.
The code was designed to close exit valves on random numbers of centrifuges so that gas would go into them but couldn’t get out. This was intended to raise the pressure inside the centrifuges and cause damage over time and also waste gas. “It’s amazing that we’re still getting insights into the development process of Stuxnet [10 years after its discovery],” said Liam O’Murchu, director of development for the Security Technology and Response division at Symantec. O’Murchu was one of three researchers at the company who reversed the code after it was discovered. “It’s interesting to see that they had the same strategy for [the first version of Stuxnet] but that it was a more manual process. ...
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