Hello and welcome back to Malicious Life I'm Ran Levy.

This is the second installment of our series on Stuxnet, the worm that struck the Iranian

nuclear program and the first ever large-scale state-level cyber

weapon. In this episode we'll dive deep into the payload of the worm and how it managed to

destroy uranium enrichment centrifuges without anyone having a clue.

I'll see you on the other side of the episode.

Bye bye.

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?

...