Iranian official: New computer worm discovered

"The damage is very slight in the initial stage," defense official Gholam Reza Jalali told the semi-official news agency Mehr.

It was unclear how long ago the worm was discovered or which systems in Iran it was designed to penetrate.

"It is compatible with the (targeted) system," Jalali said, and "it is likely to be mistaken for executable files of the government."

The announcement comes less than a year after Iranian nuclear facilities were targeted by a highly specialized computer worm called Stuxnet. It was apparently designed to secretly infiltrate the centrifuge machines that refine uranium and make them spin so fast they would break, according to David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security.

"About 10% of the centrifuges were destroyed by Stuxnet," he said, which resulted in a setback for the Iranian nuclear program by as much as a year.

Iranian officials have said they believe last year's Stuxnet cyberattack originated in Israel and the United States, but officials from neither country have commented on the malware's origin. An American and an Israeli representative reached by CNN about the latest report again declined to comment; Kazinform cites CNN.

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