Israel Targets Iran with Stuxnet Worm?

The Stuxnet computer worm - described as possibly the most dangerous malware because it can target and control specified industrial machinery - is thought to have been created in Israel to specifically target a nuclear power plant in Iran, reports the Guardian in London.

[The worm] has been most active in Iran, says the security company Symantec -- leading some experts to conjecture that the likely target of the virus is the controversial Bushehr nuclear power plant, and that it was created by Israeli hackers.

Speaking to the Guardian, security experts confirmed that Stuxnet is a targeted attack on industrial locations in specific countries, the sophistication of which takes it above and beyond previous attacks of a similar nature.

CNN explains Stuxnet this way:

It's an attack that goes straight after the PLC (programmable logic control) software of an industrial machine, which is effectively the brain of the unit. It uses four zero-day exploits in one package, with a zero-day exploit being an undiscovered flaw in a piece of software; it's the time between the hackers finding a hole in the system and when the developers patch it. And in this case there are four of these exploits, meaning that they've already exponentially increased the chances of finding a way into the system in case any of the holes happened to already be plugged.