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

by Kim Zetter

The advantages of a cyberattack over other forms of attack were many. A digital bomb could achieve some of the same effects as a kinetic weapon without putting the lives of pilots at risk. It could also achieve them covertly in a way a physical bomb could never do, by silently damaging a system over weeks and months without being detected. The Iranians would eventually see the effects of the digital sabotage, but if done well, they would never know its cause, leaving them to wonder if the problem was a material defect, a programming error, or something else. Even if the Iranians discovered the malware, a digital attack done properly left no fingerprints to be traced back to its source. This plausible deniability was key, since the United States was trying to prevent a war, not start one. There were other benefits to a digital attack. Air strikes had obvious disadvantages when it came to bombing facilities buried deep underground, as Natanz and other Iranian facilities were.16 But a digital attack could slip past air-defense systems and electrified fences to burrow effortlessly into infrastructure deep underground that was otherwise unreachable by air and other means. It could also take out centrifuges not just in known facilities but in unknown ones. You couldn’t bomb a plant you didn’t know about, but you could possibly cyberbomb it. If Iran had other secret enrichment plants distributed throughout the country that used the same equipment and configuration as Natanz, a di...