Iran’s nuclear scientists and enrichment facilities have been subject to a lot of harassment, threats, and Israeli car bombs. While some of the attacks against the nuclear programs were deadly, others were designed to destroy enrichment equipment. Then, there are the computer viruses.
In 2012, a handful of scientists at more than one of the Iranian regime’s nuclear facilities were (probably) surprised to find a virus had taken over their computers, a virus that caused their computers to turn on at full volume, blasting the arena rock of iconic metal legends AC/DC.
The scientists either aren’t AC/DC fans, or the music was just a big surprise to anyone asleep inside the Fordo mountain nuclear enrichment site. Since Western music is illegal in the Islamic Republic, the scientists might have been trying to avoid either prosecution or a really good time.
According to al-Arabiya’s English-language site, a letter from Iran’s atomic scientists was sent to F-Secure Security Labs, a Finnish internet security company, begging for help with the latest computer virus.
“I am writing you to inform you that our nuclear program has once again been compromised and attacked by a new worm with exploits which have shut down our automation network at Natanz and another facility Fordo near Qom. There was also some music playing randomly on several of the workstations during the middle of the night with the volume maxed out. I believe it was playing ‘Thunderstruck’ by AC/DC.”
The scientist who wrote the email emphasized that he was not a computer technician and didn’t know the full extent of what the virus did, but he was apparently familiar with Australian metal bands.
This isn’t the first time Iranian nuclear sites have been hit with computer viruses in an effort to disrupt the nation’s attempts to build nuclear weapons nuclear programs. In 2010, a jointly made U.S.-Israeli virus called “Stuxnet” devastated Iran’s uranium enrichment centers and computer software infrastructure without ever playing “Highway to Hell.”
Read: The Massive Ordnance Penetrator is a 30,000-pound bunker buster bomb
The Stuxnet virus represented a significant leap in virus technology, marking the first time a virus caused physical damage to systems. It sabotaged centrifuges, sent false data to operators, altered the code that regulated automated industrial processes, and infected USB drives to spread to other air-gapped nuclear sites or systems. It was a dirty deed, done dirt cheap; one that shook Iran all night long.
Playing “Thunderstruck” at full volume in the middle of the night, while annoying, certainly isn’t as destructive as the Stuxnet virus. That such malicious logic (as it’s known to military IT professionals) could penetrate Iran’s nuclear program so soon after the Stuxnet debacle goes to show how vulnerable the program really was. Or used to be, if multiple Massive Ordnance Penetrators did their job.
It’s probably for the best that Iran ultimately reached a deal, even if it was only for a short time.
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