Azerbaijan, Baku, Oct. 7/ Trend M. Moezzi /
Iran's experts have produced a cloud supercomputing security program which can perform three billion mathematical operations per second and has gained entry to 3,000 websites operated by Israel, Mehr news agency reports.
The project's manager, Abbas Jam, said a research project led to the design and operation of the cloud computing security evaluation program, named Ara.
Ara has various functions in case a cyber attack occurs and can be very helpful to the country, said Mr. Jam. Iran has been the subject of efforts to interfere with its computers.
In September 2010, Iran's industrial and nuclear computer systems were attacked by the Stuxnet worm. The worm was a malware designed to infect computers using Siemens Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) - a control system favoured by industries that manage water supplies, oil rigs and power plants.
In April 2011, Iranian officials announced that the country had been targeted by a new computer worm named Stars.
Later, news agencies reported that another computer worm named Duqu had targeted some Iranian organizations and companies.
On May 28, Reuters reported that security experts had discovered a new data-stealing spyware virus dubbed Flame that had lurked inside thousands of computers in several Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, for as long as five years as part of a sophisticated cyber warfare campaign.
Current and former U.S. government sources also told Reuters that the United States was behind Stuxnet. Kaspersky and Symantec linked Stuxnet to Flame in June, saying that part of the Flame program is nearly identical to code found in a 2009 version of Stuxnet.
For now, the two firms know very little about the newly identified viruses, except that one of them is currently deployed in the Middle East. They are not sure what the malicious software was designed to do. "It could be anything," said Costin Raiu, director of Kaspersky Lab's Global Research and Analysis Team.