The malware the Iranians used to hit Aramco was not even that sophisticated; it was essentially plagiarized from the code Americans and Israelis had used to infect and delete data on Iran’s oil networks four months earlier. But the malware—called Shamoon after a word left in the code—did exactly what it needed to do: it sent Iran’s chief regional rival, the Saudis, into a tailspin, and signaled to Washington that Iran now posed a formidable cyber threat of its own, that one day soon it would come for us.
