Countdown to Zero Day Quotes

“But this wasn’t the end of it. Normal malware executes its code in a straightforward manner by simply calling up the code and launching it. But this was too easy for Stuxnet. Instead, Stuxnet was built like a Rube Goldberg machine so that rather than calling and executing its code directly, it planted the code inside another block of code that was already running in a process on the machine, then took the code that was running in that process and slipped it inside a block of code running in another process to further obscure it.”
― Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

“Although more than 12 million viruses and other malicious files are captured each year, only about a dozen or so zero-days are found among them.”
― Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

“The following year, US forces in Kabul seized a computer in an al-Qaeda office and found models of a dam on it along with engineering software that could be used to simulate its failure.21”
― Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

“The long-term consequences of dropping the atomic bomb were also as poorly understood in the 1940s as the consequences of unleashing digital weapons are today - not only with regard to the damages they would cause, but to the global arms race they would create.”
― Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

“You couldn't bomb a plant you didn't know about, but you could possibly cyberbomb it”
― Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

“But all of this confirmed that as shocking as the revelations about Stuxnet, Duqu, and Flame were, they likely were just the shallow tip of a stockpile of tools and weapons the United States and Israel had built.”
― Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

“But more important, he also spotted an encrypted block of code that turned out to be Stuxnet’s mother lode—a large .DLL file (dynamic link library) that contained about three dozen other .DLLs and components inside, all wrapped together in layers of encryption like Russian nesting dolls.”
― Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

“iranwatch.​org/​library/​government/​iran/​iran-​irna-​khatami-​right-​all-​nations-​nuclear-​energy-​2-​9-​03”
― Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

“Each time Stuxnet infected a system, it “phoned home” to one of two internet domains masquerading as soccer fan sites—mypremierfutbol.com and todaysfutbol.com. The domain names, registered by someone who used fake names and fraudulent credit cards, pointed to servers in Denmark and Malaysia that served as command-and-control stations for the attack.”
― Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon