Bangalore:  After months of uncertainty, at last it’s official- the much feared Stuxnet virus is dead. A big sleep day for the malware- analysts has officially declared that on June 24, 2012 it has stopped replicating.

Eric Byres, CTO and vice president for engineering at Tofino Security Products, told TechNewsWorld that "It's more like neutered, rather than dead. The June 24 date stops it from replicating, but if it has infected your uranium centrifuge, it will still be doing its destructive work in the PLCs and the drive controllers.”

Byres added that after a month of its discovery, Stuxnet is pretty much dead. Antivirus companies worked so hard that within a month they had already removed the codes and disabled the virus. Designed to inflict damage on Iranian nuclear bases, later reports were confirmed that Stuxnet shared codes with another infamous malware, Flame.

John Bumgarner, CTO of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, told that "Stuxnet wasn't a failure as it was able to continuously penetrate a supposedly impenetrable network and sabotage highly critical equipment used by the Iranians to enrich uranium, which could be used to build a nuclear weapon."

But even though the virus is officially dead, the code is structured in such a way that it can live even without the code. Ralph Langner of Langner Communications, who is credited with discovering Stuxnet exclaimed that "It will live on as a zombie since it provides a blueprint for highly sophisticated attacks that can now be copied reliably. It would be foolish to assume that the usual suspects -- anywhere from China to North Korea -- would let such an opportunity to dissect and reuse components of the superweapon pass."