Hi and welcome to malicious. I'm Ran Levy.

This week, while we're busy making new episodes of the show, we're rebroadcasting a three-part series on Stuxnet,

the warm that struck the Iranian nuclear program.

Staxnet is widely considered to be the first major cyber weapon and as you'll hear

in the episodes it had a wide impact on cyber security and in particular industrial

cyber security.

We'll be airing all three parts at the same time so you won't have to wait two weeks

for the next parts of the series.

Without further ado, enjoy the episode.

Several years ago I decided to write a book.

By that point I had already written two other books and new 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 Staxnet, 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.

...