Hackers could damage US power generation plants, water treatment facilities, and other critical infrastructure with clones of the Stuxnet computer worm, warn officials at the US Department of Homeland Security.

When the Stuxnet hurt Iran's nuclear-enrichment operations, it was widely believed that it was Israel and US behind the attack.

Addressing a subcommittee of the US House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce, DHS officials expressed their concern over the wealth of technical details and code samples from Stuxnet could lead to clones that similarly target critical infrastructure in the US.

"Looking ahead, the Department is concerned that attackers could use the increasingly public information about the code to develop variants targeted at broader installations of programmable equipment in control systems," Roberta Stempfley and Sean P. McGurk warned in written comments posted on Wired.com, which reported on the warning earlier. "Copies of the Stuxnet code, in various different iterations, have been publicly available for some time now."

The Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) along with the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center "remain vigilant and continue analysis and mitigation efforts of any derivative malware.”

Stempfley and McGurk warned the US House's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations that various nation states, terrorist networks, organized crime groups, and individuals on US soil "are capable of targeting elements of the US information infrastructure to disrupt, or destroy systems upon which we depend."