Security experts can't verify Iran's claims of new worm

Without a sample of the new worm that an Iranian official says attacked the country's computers, it's impossible to verify his claims, a security research said Monday.

Kevin Haley, the director of Symantec's security response group, said that his team has not found an example of the worm, dubbed "Stars" by the Iranian military commander responsible for investigating Stuxnet, the sophisticated malware that attacked the country's uranium enrichment facilities beginning in June 2009.

[ Also on InfoWorld: What we really know about the Stuxnet worm. | Master your security with InfoWorld's interactive Security iGuide. | Stay up to date on the latest security developments with InfoWorld's Security Central newsletter. ]

"Generally, samples [of malware] do get traded among security vendors," said Haley, explaining that when one antivirus company lacks malware it wants to analyze, it asks other firms to share their samples. "[Iran'] makes this a little more difficult, because we have no direct relationships there," added Haley. "But perhaps someone else does."

Although Symantec has asked researchers in other companies if they have a sample, as of late Monday it has not been able to acquire one.

No other security vendor has stepped forward to say it has a copy of Stars.

Security experts need the malware to corroborate claims by Brigadier Gen. Gholam Reza Jalali, the head of Iran's Passive Defense Organization, the military unit that defends the country's nuclear program.

On Monday, Jalali told Iran's Mehr News Agency that the Stars worm had been detected and thwarted, but provided no information on its function or targets, or when it was discovered.

Jalali's claim came just a week after he blamed Siemens for helping U.S. and Israeli teams create Stuxnet.

Stuxnet, which targeted industrial control systems manufactured by Siemens, has been called a "groundbreaking" piece of malware because it used multiple "zero-day" vulnerabilities, hid while it wreaked havoc on Iran's uranium enrichment hardware, and required enormous resources to create.

It's possible that Stars was not a targeted attack aimed at Iran, but simply part of a more traditional broad-based assault, said Haley.

"It could be a mass attack that got through their defenses," he said. "That could have raised the alarm. They're already paranoid about attacks."

Symantec sees millions of threats every day, the vast majority of which are not targeted, Haley said.

If that's the case, trying to identify Stars would be impossible. "In the case of Stuxnet, we actually had samples, we just didn't understand the significance of the threat until later," Haley said. "Finding [Stars] in our database would be like finding a needle in a haystack" without more information from Iran.

"And even if we found something, we wouldn't know if it was the one they're talking about," said Haley.

Other antivirus vendors, including Helsinki-based F-Secure and U.K. security company Sophos, also acknowledged that they could not verify Iran's claims.

"We can't tie this case to any particular sample we might already have," admitted Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure's chief research officer, in a blog post Monday. "We don't know if Iran[ian] officials have just found some ordinary Windows worm and announced it to be a cyber war attack."

Graham Cluley, a senior security technology consultant at Sophos, also said his company had not been able to identify the malware.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed. His email address is [email protected].

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