A fascinating read behind the complex Stuxnet virus.

It was January 2010, and investigators with the International Atomic Energy Agency had just completed an inspection at the uranium enrichment plant outside Natanz in central Iran, when they realized that something was off within the cascade rooms where thousands of centrifuges were enriching uranium.

Natanz technicians in white lab coats, gloves and blue booties were scurrying in and out of the “clean” cascade rooms, hauling out unwieldy centrifuges one by one, each sheathed in shiny silver cylindrical casings.

Any time workers at the plant decommissioned damaged or otherwise unusable centrifuges, they were required to line them up for IAEA inspection to verify that no radioactive material was being smuggled out in the devices before they were removed. The technicians had been doing so now for more than a month.
“We were not immune to the fact that there was a bigger geopolitical picture going on. We were definitely thinking … do I really want my name to be put on this?” – Eric Chien

Normally Iran replaced up to 10 percent of its centrifuges a year, due to material defects and other issues. With about 8,700 centrifuges installed at Natanz at the time, it would have been normal to decommission about 800 over the course of the year.

But when the IAEA later reviewed footage from surveillance cameras installed outside the cascade rooms to monitor Iran’s enrichment program, they were stunned as they counted the numbers. The workers had been replacing the units at an incredible rate — later estimates would indicate between 1,000 and 2,000 centrifuges were swapped out over a few months.

The question was, why?

Cliff notes?

I'll get to the rest after lunch, here's what i've covered so far:

American companies probably broke apart a year long covert us op to destroy irans nuclear weapon ambition using the first known case of cyber weaponry

The un nuke watch dog could see the impact of the attack but wasn't aware of the cause

The Trojan was large, very well written and very targeted but it travelled too widely

Its production possibly included physical espionage in taiwan (break-ins), but this can not be confirmed

Wowzers. That's was a pretty cool story, lateral. Thanks for that!

Every now and then, Wired produces a gem article (eg, "The New Diamond Age", "Art of the Steal", "Gone Forever"). This is another gem.

tl;dr

read it, it's worth it.

that was interesting as hell. Nice find.

Took a while but an interesting story.

cant wait for the tom clancy version of this shit

yeah i loved that article - so interesting - i stopped reading wired ages ago as i thought it went downhill a lot but this article was fantastic

Yea the one thing I take away from that article is that it sux that it was discovered, damn rebooting PC.