The Real Story of Stuxnet

Update 13 June 2025: The attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities are the latest in a two-decade campaign by the Israeli military and intelligence establishments to disrupt and hinder Iran’s efforts to build atomic weapons. On Thursday, 12 June, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel announced that Israeli warplanes had struck “Iran’s main enrichment facility in Natanz,” one of two sites where Iran has been operating centrifuges to enrich uranium to levels well beyond what is needed for peaceful uses, such as power generation.

These latest attacks come 15 years after Israel mounted an intelligence operation that inserted a worm, called Stuxnet, into the software at Natanz that controlled the centrifuge cascades. The operation destroyed approximately 1,000 centrifuges at the facility. Stuxnet is regarded as the first cyberweapon that succeeded in destroying industrial infrastructure in an intelligence operation. In this article, published in February, 2013, IEEE Spectrum had one of the first in-depth accounts of how the Stuxnet worm was discovered and analyzed.

Original article from 26 February 2013 follows:

Computer cables snake across the floor. Cryptic flowcharts are scrawled across various whiteboards adorning the walls. A life-size Batman doll stands in the hall. This office might seem no different than any other geeky workplace, but in fact it’s the front line of a war—a cyberwar, where most battles play out not in remote jungles or deserts but in suburban office parks like this one. As a senior researcher for Kaspersky Lab, a leading computer security firm based in Moscow, Roel Schouwenberg spends his days (and many nights) here at the lab’s U.S. headquarters in Woburn, Mass., battling the most insidious digital weapons ever, capable of crippling water supplies, power plants, banks, and the very infrastructure that once seemed invulnerable to attack.