IranTechnology

Iran Displays Achievements in Defusing Sabotage Attacks on Nuclear Sites

The Iranian Intelligence Ministry displayed its latest discoveries and achievements made in defusing enemy plots and sabotage attacks on the country’s nuclear and defensive sites and facilities.

The exhibition visited by reporters also showcases the latest achievements of the intelligence ministry in discovering and defusing the plots hatched by the enemies to sabotage Iran’s nuclear, defensive, industrial and telecommunication centers, including the supply of virus-infected equipment to nuclear, energy, telecommunication, oil and defense facilities and cyber infrastructures.

It is the first time that an exhibition is held in Iran to show American, French and German equipment used for sabotage acts against Iran’s vital and important facilities.

Senior Iranian parliamentary officials revealed on Saturday that German company Siemens intended to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program by selling a booby-trapped equipment to Tehran.

Chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Alaeddin Boroujerdi told the Parliament’s news agency, ICANA, Iranian security experts discovered small explosives embedded in equipment Tehran bought from Siemens for its nuclear program.

Boroujerdi said Iranian security experts discovered the explosives and removed them before detonation. The authorities believe that the booby-trapped equipment was sold to derail uranium enrichment efforts, he said.

Boroujerdi said, “The equipment was supposed to blow up after installation in order to destroy our (nuclear) systems.”

“But the wisdom of our experts thwarted the enemy conspiracy.”

Siemens said its nuclear division had had no business with Iran since the 1979 revolution.

Some Iranian officials have also suggested in the past that specific European companies may have sold faulty equipment to Iran with the knowledge of American intelligence agencies and their own governments, since the sales would have harmed, rather than helped, the country’s nuclear program.

The campaign against Iran includes the abduction of scientists, the sale of faulty equipment and the planting of a destructive computer worm known as Stuxnet, which sought to disrupt Iran’s uranium enrichment activity in 2010.

Iran’s nuclear chief, Fereidoun Abbasi, said Monday that separate attacks on Iran’s centrifuges – through tiny explosives meant to disable key parts of the machines – were discovered before the blasts could go off on timers.

Abbasi also told the UN nuclear agency in Vienna that “terrorists and saboteurs” might have infiltrated the International Atomic Energy Agency, after the watchdog’s inspectors arrived at the Fordo underground enrichment facility shortly after power lines were blown up through sabotage on Aug. 17.

Iran has several times complained that the IAEA is sending spies in the guise of inspectors to collect information about its nuclear activities, pointing to leaks of information by inspectors to US and other officials.

Five nuclear scientists and researchers have been killed in Iran since 2010. All the Iranian scientists have been assassinated by Israel’s Mossad spy agency as well as the CIA and Britain’s MI-6, according to Iranian intelligence ministry.

Boroujerdi said repeated leaks of nuclear information to Iran’s adversaries by the IAEA would justify a cut of Tehran’s ties with the UN nuclear watchdog agency.

“Iran has the right to cut its cooperation with the IAEA should such violations continue,” he said.

Over the past few years Iran has been the target of numerous cyber attacks carried out to disrupt the country’s industrial systems, but Iranian experts have managed to find and defuse such highly dangerous plots.

In May, Iran announced that its cyber experts detected and contained a complicated Israeli spy virus known as “Flame”.

The head of Information Technology Organization of Iran, Ali Hakim Javadi, said earlier that the country’s experts had managed to produce anti-virus software that could spot and remove the detected computer virus “Flame”.

Javadi said that the indigenous anti-virus software had been capable of detecting the virus and cleaning up the infected computers.

He said that the malware was different from other viruses and was more destructive than Stuxnet.

On April 24, an Iranian oil official said the country’s experts had contained cyber attacks against the country’s Oil Ministry.

Hamdollah Mohammadnejad, deputy minister in engineering affairs, said “Recently, a few number of National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) servers were attacked by a malware, but the cyber security experts of oil industry contained it immediately.”

In October 2010, Iranian Intelligence Minister Heidar Moslehi announced that Iran had detected and thwarted a virus aimed at infecting the country’s nuclear plant system.

Iran said the computer worm, Stuxnet, had infected some IP addresses in Iran, including the personal computers of the staff at the country’s first nuclear power plant in Bushehr. Tehran said Israel and the US were behind the infection of its industrial sites.

Back to top button