Hi, welcome to Malicious Life. I'm Ran Levy.

Here's the third and final part of our series on Stuxnet, the Worms

that struck the Iranian nuclear program. We'll be talking this time about the software

bug that caused this ultra sophisticated weapon to be discovered and about

Stuxnet to sister worms, duku and flame.

Enjoy the episode.

The last two parts of the episode focused on the technological characteristics of Staxnet, a computer virus that attacked the Uranium enrichment facility in Iran and was exposed in 2010 almost accidentally by a small IT company from Belarus.

We describe the way the malicious software penetrated the facility's network, located the control systems computers,

and finally started messing with the gas centrifuges by increasing and decreasing their rotation

speed, all while presenting pre-recorded false data to the

technicians and programmers.

This level of sophistication made Stuxnet a groundbreaking malware, the first real cyber weapon.

Now it's time to talk about the people who created it.

In the computer security business, the people who created it.

In the computer security business, this question is usually considered to be secondary.

In most cases, even if we do catch the creators of malicious software and punish them, the software itself still

continues to spread.

It's like a man releasing a lion from its cage.

We might be able to punish the man, but the priority is catching the lion

before it gets downtown. In Stuxet's case, however, identifying the creators of the software isn't secondary at all.

On the contrary, if it's possible to prove that it was created by a government agency,

then a tax net becomes much more than a computer virus.

...