The aim is to make each "patient zero" an unwitting carrier who will help spread and transport the weapon on flash drives into the protected facility and the Siemens computers. To get Stuxnet to its target machines, the attackers first infect computers belonging to five outside companies that are believed to be connected in some way to the nuclear program. So the attackers have designed their weapon to spread via infected USB flash drives. Because the computers are air-gapped from the internet, however, they cannot be reached directly by the remote attackers. Their weapon this time is designed to manipulate computer systems made by the German firm Siemens that control and monitor the speed of the centrifuges. They unleash it just as the enrichment plant is beginning to recover from the effects of the previous attack. As Iran prepares for its presidential elections, the attackers behind Stuxnet are also preparing their next assault on the enrichment plant with a new version of the malware. Uranium gas flows through the pipes into the centrifuges in a series of stages, becoming further "enriched" at each stage of the cascade as isotopes needed for a nuclear reaction are separated from other isotopes and become concentrated in the gas.Ĭountdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital WeaponĪs the excerpt begins, it's June 2009-a year or so since Stuxnet was first released, but still a year before the covert operation will be discovered and exposed. At the time of the attacks, each cascade at Natanz held 164 centrifuges. Centrifuges are large cylindrical tubes-connected by pipes in a configuration known as a "cascade"-that spin at supersonic speed to separate isotopes in uranium gas for use in nuclear power plants and weapons. An early version of the attack weapon manipulated valves on the centrifuges to increase the pressure inside them and damage the devices as well as the enrichment process. In this excerpt from the book, which will be released November 11, Stuxnet has already been at work silently sabotaging centrifuges at the Natanz plant for about a year. Rather than simply hijacking targeted computers or stealing information from them, it escaped the digital realm to wreak physical destruction on equipment the computers controlled.Ĭountdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon, written by WIRED senior staff writer Kim Zetter, tells the story behind Stuxnet's planning, execution and discovery. Stuxnet, as it came to be known, was unlike any other virus or worm that came before. That is, until the researchers found a handful of malicious files on one of the systems and discovered the world's first digital weapon. Again, the cause of the problem was a mystery. A computer security firm in Belarus was called in to troubleshoot a series of computers in Iran that were crashing and rebooting repeatedly. The cause was a complete mystery-apparently as much to the Iranian technicians replacing the centrifuges as to the inspectors observing them.įive months later a seemingly unrelated event occurred. In January 2010, inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency visiting the Natanz uranium enrichment plant in Iran noticed that centrifuges used to enrich uranium gas were failing at an unprecedented rate.
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