The US tried to deploy a version of the Stuxnet computer virus to attack North Korea’s nuclear weapons program five years ago, but ultimately failed, according to people familiar with the covert campaign.
The operation began in tandem with the now-famous Stuxnet attack that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear program in 2009 and 2010 by destroying 1,000 or more centrifuges that were enriching uranium. Reports have said that the Iran attack was a joint effort by US and Israeli forces.
According to one US intelligence source, Stuxnet’s developers produced a related virus that would be activated when it encountered Korean-language settings on an infected machine.
However, US agents could not access the core machines that ran Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, said a former high-ranking intelligence official who was briefed on the program.
The official said the US National Security Agency (NSA)-led campaign was stymied by North Korea’s utter secrecy, as well as the extreme isolation of its communications systems.
Another source, also previously with US intelligence, said he had heard about the failed cyberattack, but did not know details about the incident.
North Korea has some of the most isolated communications networks in the world. Just owning a computer requires police permission, and the open Internet is unknown except to a tiny elite. The nation has one main conduit for Internet connections to the outside world, through China.
By contrast, people in Iran had access to the Internet broadly and interacted with companies from around the globe.
A spokeswoman for the NSA declined to comment. The spy agency has previously declined to comment on the Stuxnet attack against Iran.
The US has launched many cyberespionage campaigns, but North Korea is only the second nation, after Iran, that the NSA is now known to have targeted with software designed to destroy equipment.
Washington has long expressed concerns about Pyongyang’s nuclear program, which it said breaches international agreements. North Korea has been hit with sanctions because of its nuclear and missile tests, moves that Pyongyang sees as an attack on its sovereign right to defend itself.
US Secretary of State John Kerry last week said that Washington and Beijing were discussing imposing further sanctions on North Korea, which he said was “not even close” to taking steps to end its nuclear program.
Experts in nuclear programs said there are similarities between North Korea and Iran’s operations, and that the two nations continue to collaborate on military technology.
Both nations use a system with P-2 centrifuges, obtained by Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan, who is regarded as the father of Islamabad’s nuclear bomb, they said.
Like Iran, North Korea probably directs its centrifuges with control software developed by Siemens AG that runs on Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system, the experts said.
Stuxnet took advantage of vulnerabilities in both the Siemens and Microsoft programs.
Due to the overlap between North Korea and Iran’s nuclear programs, the NSA would not have had to tinker much with Stuxnet to make it capable of destroying centrifuges in North Korea, if it could be deployed there.
Despite modest differences between the programs, “Stuxnet can deal with both of them, but you still need to get it in,” said Olli Heinonen, senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and former deputy director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
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