There is a Reuter’s article today that caught my eye.
The heading of the article states that Iranian engineers have succeeded in neutralizing the Stuxnet virus from its nuclear facilities.
This particular paragraph caught my eye:
U.S. and European officials, who insisted on anonymity when discussing a highly sensitive subject, said their governments’ experts agreed that the Iranians had succeeded in disabling Stuxnet and getting it out of their machinery.
So how do the U.S. and European officials know? If it was from a planted intelligence source, then the wording “experts agreed that the Iranians had succeeded in disabling Stuxnet” is inappropriate. It would not be a case of ‘agreeing’ but of ‘have been told by a reliable source that…’
If the U.S. and European officials ‘experts agreed that the Iranians had succeeded in disabling Stuxnet’ because they have direct access to the nuclear facility, then perhaps they could inject a variation of the virus at some point in the future.
Of course, the Reuters article may have used sloppy wording, but still…