Not yet. The virus has damaged so far mainly uranium enrichment centrifuges at Natanz  in Iran. Maybe it has delayed the Bushehr nuclear plant going online. No widespread radioactive contamination yet, no airplane crashes. No erroneous firing of missiles, or just another war in the Middle East. So far.

President Obama, who is in the midst of a re-election campaign, apparently is in need for good news. So, it was him who had ordered cyber attacks on Iran already in 2009. Despite his elaborated, well, hypocritical overtures in Nowruz messages to the Iranian people in 2009 and 2010. Does he know that he might just have opened Pandora’s box? Does he consider the consequences of expected reverse engineering?

As Jason Ditz at AntiWar puts it, “the enormous damage such viruses have caused when they inevitably move beyond the target and start attacking computers worldwide suggest it isn’t exactly a panacea … .” A fiasco so far.

Last modified June 2, 2012.