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

by Kim Zetter

The Khan network evidently purchased the devices from two businessmen in Turkey and secretly shipped them to Iran and Libya.23 But in early 2006, when Iran attempted to enrich its first batch of uranium in a small cascade at the pilot plant at Natanz, things went terribly wrong. The cascade ran fine for about ten days, but then the sabotage kicked in and all of the centrifuges had to be replaced. No one said anything about it at the time. But a year later, during a televised interview, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization described what had occurred. Technicians had installed 50 centrifuges in the cascade, he explained, but one night “all 50 had exploded.” The UPS controlling the electricity “had not acted properly,” he said, and created a surge. “Later we found out that the UPS we had imported through Turkey had been manipulated.” He also said that after the incident occurred they began checking all imported instruments before using them.24