Hello and welcome to malicious life I'm Ran Levy this week's episode is part two of our series

on Staxnet the computer virus that struck the Iranian nuclear program. As I told you at the beginning of the previous episode, my third book was called Battle of Minds, a history of computer viruses.

Writing a book is never easy,

but this time I ran into a new problem,

one that I never encountered when writing before.

Paranoia.

You see, while doing research for the book, I visited countless websites that can only be described as

dubious, hacker forums, virus spreading websites and so on.

I'm a cautious person, so I took all measures I could to protect my computer from getting

infected from any scary viruses.

But despite my efforts, I was always worried that I missed something and would get infected by some malware.

Every time my computer acted slightly weird

I immediately wondered whether it had to do with a virus.

Slow internet, it might be a virus.

Some software stopped working? A Trojan. The hard disk is overactive.

It's malware for sure. You get the picture. I was a digital hypochondriac.

But why am I telling you this?

Because I believe that right now, a few thousand miles away,

perhaps inside an underground bunker somewhere

there are programmers and technicians who are sitting in front of their computers

and experiencing the same paranoia. But first a mini recap. In the first part of this episode I introduced you to Stuxnet,

a malicious software that flipped the IT security world upside down when it was exposed in 2010.

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