Researchers have discovered a new worm in the wild that they say bears an uncanny resemblance to Stuxnet, the malware widely believed to be created specifically to disrupt Iran's efforts to create a nuclear arsenal.

Dubbed Duqu, the worm's similarity has led to the assertion that Duqu was either created by the same team--or by someone with access to the source code.

As reported by Dark Reading, Roel Schouwenberg, senior researcher at Kaspersky Lab, said: "It would be a huge amount of work to get to this level of similarity by reverse-engineering."

Interestingly though, Duqu does not appear to have a clear target other than intelligence-gathering from various industrial control systems. So far, the mysterious malware has been observed to create a backdoor on infected systems and connect to a command-and-control server.

With no built-in mechanism to replicate itself, the threat silently removes itself after 36 days. Given this benign behavior, Symantec researchers wrote that "Duqu is essentially the precursor to a future Stuxnet-like attack."

The reconnaissance was believed to have taken place on infected computers since December 2010. Symantec researchers have since determined that industrial computers "around the globe" have already been infected, reports eWeek. It is evident that Duqu was created to hunt for something--though the object of its world-wide search has so far eluded everyone.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at eWeek
- check out this article at Dark Reading

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