The Stuxnet Story
The secret project was called “Olympic Games”. Its aim was to cripple the Iranian nuclear program “without setting off a regional war”, writes David Sanger in his super-interesting book on cyber warfare titled Perfect Weapon . The US and Israel settled on creating a malware (computer virus) that would speed up/slow down the Iranian nuclear centrifuges, leading them to “ultimately destroy themselves”. Being a covert operation, the US (and Israel) couldn’t claim they’d done it. So how then did this story, the malware now known as Stuxnet, break out? Well, it was rooted in the fact that Stuxnet couldn’t be simply added onto an Iranian centrifuge (obviously). It had to be spread all over the world, and hopefully would end up entering the centrifuges via malice (an Iranian traitor) or by usual stupidity (someone carrying an infected USB into work). As with any scatter and pray operation, the malware thus reached all over the world (We’ll come to why it didn’t do any damage anywher...