TEHRAN, Iran — Computer technicians battling to contain a complex virus last month resorted to the ultimate firewall measures - cutting off Internet links to Iran’s Oil Ministry, rigs and the hub for nearly all the country’s crude exports.
At the time, Iranian officials described it as a datas iphoning blitz on key oil networks.
On Wednesday, they gave it a name: A strike by the powerful “Flame” malware that experts this week have called a new and highly sophisticated program capable of hauling away computer files and even listening in on computer users. Its origins remain a mystery, but international suspicion quickly fell on Israel opening another front in its suspected covert wars with archenemy Tehran.
“This virus penetrated some fields. One of them was the oil sector,” said Gholam Reza Jalali, who heads an Iranian military unit in charge of fighting sabotage. “Fortunately, we detected and controlled this single incident.”
The Flame virus - a mix of cyber-spy and hard-drive burglar - has been detected across the Middle East recently. But Iran’s linkage to the oil-network attack in April could mark its first major infiltration and suggests a significant escalation in attempts to disrupt Iran’s key commercial and nuclear sites. Iran is one of the world’s leading oil producers.
Two years ago, a virus called Stuxnet tailored to disrupt Iran’s nuclear centrifuges caused some setbacks within its uranium-enrichment labs and infected an estimated 16,000 computers, Iranian officials say. At least two other smaller viruses have been detected in nuclear and industrial centers.
The Flame program, however, is widely considered atechnological leap in breakin programming. Some experts also see the same high level of engineering shared by Stuxnet, which many suspect was the work of Israeli intelligence.
“It is very complex and very sophisticated,” said Marco Obiso, cyber-security coordinator at the U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union in Geneva. “It’s one of the most serious yet.”
Israel, a world leader in computer security, has never confirmed or denied any involvement in Stuxnet or other viruses that have hit Iranian networks nationwide.
Israel fears that Iran’s nuclear program is geared toward developing a weapon that might be turned against it. Israel itself is believed to have nuclear weapons.
Israeli leaders have repeatedly said that “all options are on the table,” a phrase that is widely interpreted as meaning the possibility of a military strike and other measures that could include cyber-warfare.
Already, Iran and Israel have traded accusations of carrying out clandestine hits and attack conspiracies in locales stretching from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Bangkok.
Iran claims Israeli agents are behind the slayings of at least five nuclear scientists and researchers since 2010. Earlier this month, Iran hanged a man convicted of carrying out one of the killings after purportedly being trained by Israel’s Mossad spy agency. Israel denied any role.
Authorities in several countries, meanwhile, are investigating possible Iranian links to bombings and plots against Israeli targets and others, including a wide-ranging probe in Azerbaijan’s capital,Baku.
On the cyber-front, Iran says it has sharply boosted its defenses by creating a special computer corps to protect crucial online infrastructure. Iran also claims it seeks to build its own Internet buffered from the global Web, but experts have raisedserious questions about its feasibility.
Ali Hakim Javadi, Iran’s deputy minister of communications and information technology, was quoted by the official IRNA news agency Wednesday as saying that Iranian experts have produced an anti-virus program capable of identifying and removing Flame.
“The anti-virus software was delivered to selected organizations in early May,” he said.
That would have been at least two weeks after officials say it penetrated Iran’s Oil Ministry and related sites. Within hours, technicians decided to close off the Internet connections to the ministry, oil rigs and the Khark Island oil terminal, the jump-off point for about 80 percent of Iran’s daily 2.2 million barrels of crude exports.
Obiso, whose agency is helping to direct the international response to Flame, said the virus first came to the group’s attention in mid-April and researchers have been working on unraveling its code since.
“We still think Flame has much more to show,” he said.
The Russian Internet security firm Kaspersky Lab ZAO said the Flame virus has struck Iran the hardest, but has been detected in the Palestinian territories, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
It also has been found in Israel, leading some Israeli security officials to suggest the virus could be traced to the U.S. or other Western nations.
Information for this article was contributed by Raphael Satter and Josef Federman of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 05/31/2012