Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

by Kim Zetter

The Kaspersky team had seen a lot of digital spy tools over the years—many of them believed to be nation-state tools from China—but this one rewrote the book. If James Bond’s Q Branch had a digital armory, Flame would have been part of it. It came with a cornucopia of spy gadgetry aimed at collecting intelligence from victims in a multitude of ways. Among them was one module that siphoned documents from infected machines, and another that recorded keystrokes and captured screenshots every fifteen to sixty seconds. A third module surreptitiously engaged an infected computer’s internal microphone to eavesdrop on conversations in its vicinity. A fourth module used the computer’s Bluetooth function to swipe data from any discoverable smartphones and other Bluetooth-enabled devices in the area.