Hello and welcome to malicious life. I'm Ran Levy.

This week's episode, Staxnet, the computer virus that struck Iran's nuclear program, part one. Several years ago I decided to write a book.

By that point I had already written two other books and knew from experience that it's easy to get distracted by fascinating research that isn't necessarily relevant to a book's theme or thesis.

This particular book was on the history of computer viruses, also known as malware.

But because many new viruses appear around the world every year, choosing the viruses

that would make the final list wasn't an easy task.

Yet from the very beginning it was clear to me that one of the chapters would be

dedicated to a malware called Stuxnet, the subject of this episode.

Staxnet was discovered in 2010 after an unprecedented attack on an Iranian uranium enrichment facility.

At that time, it was the most complicated and sophisticated malware ever known.

Yet it wasn't its technological sophistication that made it so prominent in a relatively

short history of computer viruses.

The Stuxnet attack was a terrifying display.

It illustrated to us how weak and exposed to cyber attacks are the industrial infrastructures that we all depend on,

including nuclear reactors and petrochemical factories.

But it was more than a wake-up call.

After discovering Stuxnet, we were forced to ask ourselves how many more potentially devastating

viruses are out there. Not that there weren't any sophisticated computer viruses before 2010, there were quite a few.

But Stuxnet targeted a very specific niche of the computerized world, a field that most of us aren't

familiar with and aren't exposed to on a daily basis.

Computerized industrial control systems.

For that reason, I have invited Andrew Ginter,

...