Cyber War Envelops Middle East

Iran has already been hit by Flame, Duqu, and Stuxnet. Now we are learning of a more mysterious attack against Iran’s oil infrastructure by malware called “Wiper:”

Wiper was an aggressive piece of malware that targeted machines belonging to the Iranian Oil Ministry and the National Iranian Oil Company in April.
…No one has ever found a sample of Wiper in order to study its code and determine exactly what it did to machines in Iran, but Kaspersky did obtain mirror images of “dozens” of hard drives that had been hit by the malware.
Although the disks were thoroughly wiped in most cases, leaving no malware behind – or much of anything else – the researchers did find evidence of its previous existence on some of the systems that weren’t completely wiped. The evidence came in the form of a registry key that pointed to files that had been on the machines before being erased.
According to Kaspersky, the wiping activity occurred between April 21 and April 30. Wiper’s erase operation focused initially on destroying data on the first half of a disk, then systematically erasing system files, causing the systems to crash and preventing them from rebooting… _Wiredhttp://peakoil.com/publicpolicy/cyber-war-envelops-middle-east/