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

by Kim Zetter

THE RUSH-HOUR TRAFFIC on Artesh Boulevard in northern Tehran was particularly congested the morning of November 29, 2010, when Majid Shahriari, a slim forty-year-old professor of nuclear physics maneuvered his Peugeot sedan through the bumper-to-bumper gridlock on his way to work. It was only seven forty-five on that Monday morning, but a layer of smog already hovered in the air as Shahriari inched his way toward Shahid Beheshti University, where he was a lecturer. With him in the car were his wife, also a nuclear physics professor and mother of two, and a bodyguard. As the sedan approached a busy intersection, assailants on a motorcycle suddenly pulled alongside Shahriari’s vehicle and brazenly slapped a “sticky” bomb to the driver’s-side door. Seconds after they zipped away, the bomb exploded, shattering the car’s rear window and leaving the driver’s-side door a twisted mess of molten metal. Shahriari was instantly killed; his wife and bodyguard were injured, though spared. A small pit in the asphalt next to the car testified to the force of the blast.7 Not long after, in another part of the city, Fereydoon Abbasi, a fifty-two-year-old expert in nuclear isotope separation, was also making his way through traffic toward the same destination, when, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a motorcycle approaching. A second later he heard the distinctive sound of something being attached to his door. Abbasi was a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, so his defensive instin...