NEW YORK (Rooters agency) – The United Nations today imposed sanctions on the United States and Israel for their destructive hacking into computers in Iran and elsewhere in Asia.
A US-Israeli operation has been identified by computer experts as the source of the Stuxnet computer worm, which is believed to have caused significant damage to Iran’s uranium enrichment program and to at least one power plant and other industries in that country.
As well, significant infections of the Stuxnet worm have occurred in Indonesia, India, and – for some mysterious reason – Azerbaijan.
The US and Israel have never admitted to any connection with Stuxnet. But in 2011, when the existence of Stuxnet first became widely known, Gary Smarmy, White House Collaborator for Weapons of Mass Destruction, said, “We’re glad the Iranians are having trouble with their centrifuges, and we are doing everything we can to make sure that we complicate matters for them.”
In the UN debate, the Iranian ambassador noted: “The governments of both the United States and Israel have a long history of denying responsibility for their destructive and provocative actions, and if they want to help here, they can admit their culpability and compensate Iran for the damage they caused.”
Noting that Stuxnet spread through exploiting opportunities in the Windows operating system, the UN sanctions target people who own more than 1% of Windows’ total stock, as well as various Israeli and US war criminals and Nobel laureates. They are prohibited from pretending to be philanthropists, on pain of life imprisonment for “really grotesque hypocrisy.”
Rooters was able to interview a US official – whom we have named Big Tonsils to hide his identity – who has considerable knowledge about the Stuxnet program. “It’s true,” he said, “that the Stuxnet worm got a bit out of control. There are some replications still floating around here and in Israel, let alone parts of Asia. You just can’t avoid collateral damage in these sorts of conflicts.”
Big Tonsils said he was as mystified as everyone else by the Stuxnet intrusion into Azerbaijan. “Iran, Indonesia, India – that makes sense; they all begin with ‛I’ and are in Asia. But Azerbaijan? I don’t know; maybe somebody in the CIA wasn’t good on spelling geographical names.”
According to Big Tonsils, the US made considerable efforts to to get Stuxnet into North Korea, but was unsuccessful. “We really tried to infect even one of their computers. But there just weren’t enough computers there to give us a chance.”
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