How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History

It was January 2010 when investigators with the International Atomic Energy Agency realized something was off at the uranium enrichment plant outside Natanz in central Iran. Months earlier, someone had silently unleashed a sophisticated and destructive digital worm that had been slithering its way through computers in Iran — to sabotage the country’s uranium enrichment program and prevent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from building a nuclear weapon.
Satellite image of the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant in Iran taken in 2002 when it was still under construction. The...
Satellite image of the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant in Iran taken in 2002 when it was still under construction. The image shows two cascade halls, in the upper right corner, as they were being built deep underground. The hall on the left, Hall A, is the only one currently operational and is the building where centrifuges believed to have been damaged by Stuxnet in 2009 were installed. (Photo: DigitalGlobe and Institute for Science and International Security)DigitalGlobe and Institute for Science and International Security