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September 2, 2019 10:30 pm

How a Secret Dutch Mole Aided the US-Israeli Stuxnet Cyberattack on Iran

For years, an enduring mystery has surrounded the Stuxnet virus attack that targeted Iran's nuclear program: How did the U.S. and Israel get their malware onto computer systems at the highly secured uranium-enrichment plant? From a report: The first-of-its-kind virus, designed to sabotage Iran's nuclear program, effectively launched the era of digital warfare and was unleashed some time in 2007, after Iran began installing its first batch of centrifuges at a controversial enrichment plant near the village of Natanz. The courier behind that intrusion, whose existence and role has not been previously reported, was an inside mole recruited by Dutch intelligence agents at the behest of the CIA and the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, according to sources who spoke with Yahoo News. An Iranian engineer recruited by the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD provided critical data that helped the U.S. developers target their code to the systems at Natanz, according to four intelligence sources. That mole then provided much-needed inside access when it came time to slip Stuxnet onto those systems using a USB flash drive. The Dutch were asked in 2004 to help the CIA and Mossad get access to the plant, but it wasn't until three years later that the mole, who posed as a mechanic working for a front company doing work at Natanz, delivered the digital weapon to the targeted systems. "[T]he Dutch mole was the most important way of getting the virus into Natanz," one of the sources told Yahoo.

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