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Iran admitted on Sunday that unspecified computer systems in the country had been infected with the Duqu worm, a strain of malware similar to the infamous Stuxnet worm that sabotaged key nuclear plant systems in the country last year.

The head of Iran's civil defence organization told the official IRNA news agency that the outbreak was under control. "The software to control the [Duqu] virus has been developed and made available to organisations and corporations," Brigadier General Gholamreza Jalali said, AFP reports.

Duqu was discovered in early September by computer scientists at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Subsequent analysis by anti-virus analysts at Symantec, F-Secure and others revealed the malware was closely related to the earlier Stuxnet worm, albeit probably designed for a different purpose.

The worm, like Stuxnet, features a forged digital certificate and makes use of Windows zero-day exploits. But Stuxnet made use of three zero-day exploits, Duqu uses just one (a flaw involving the TrueType font parsing engine).

Stuxnet was designed to infect industrial control systems and narrowly focused on screwing up the operation of any high-speed centrifuges connected to these systems, such as the kit Iran uses to enrich uranium. While Stuxnet was designed for sabotage, Duqu appears to be built with reconnaissance in mind. The malware collects information from infected systems, possibly in preparation for future attacks.

Jalali described Duqu as the third virus to hit Iran following Stuxnet and the Stars worm it said it detected in April. It's unclear if Stars is also related to Stuxnet. Oddly, and rather suspiciously, samples of stars have not come into the possession of Western anti-virus firms, leading some to publicly question whether the malware was anything more than a propaganda ploy by Tehran. ®

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