Siemens and Stuxnet/Olympic Games

David E. Sanger’s book about „Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power“ came out today. An interesting read. Wonder what he will have to say in an updated version about the Flame virus. Most of his sources might have been axed by then.

There are some interesting details about the role of German Siemens engineers in deploying the Stuxnet/Olympic Games virus:

Soon there was a list of targets, from the scientists who worked inside the program (some of whom were listed, in public, in the annexes to United Nations sanctions lists) to technicians from Siemens, the giant German electronics firm whose programmable logic controllers, conveniently, had been purchased by the Iranians, who wanted their centrifuges run by the best available technology.

(….)

It took months for the beacons to do their work and report home—complete with maps of the electronic directories of the controllers, and what amounted to blueprints of how the centrifuges spinning in the basement in Natanz were connected to their electronic control systems. According to one person involved, it helped that Siemens was maintaining the system every few weeks, updating the software. “Siemens had no idea they were a carrier,” one official told me. (American officials insist that the United States steered clear of the Siemens engineers, for fear of jeopardizing their relationship with Germany’s intelligence service. But those diplomatic niceties apparently did not stop the Israelis.) Soon it was not an issue: the Iranians, suspicious of the German engineers, banned them from access to Natanz, either directly or remotely.