In 2010 a computer worm of unprecedented sophistication escaped into the wild and stumped the entire security industry — until researchers realized it ignored every machine on Earth except the exact Siemens controllers spinning uranium centrifuges at one plant in Iran. It quietly sped the rotors to destruction while feeding the engineers pre-recorded 'all normal' readings, and in doing so it rewrote the rules of war.
Start here for the whole arc: a joint US-Israeli intelligence operation that used four never-before-seen Windows zero-days to leap air-gapped networks and physically wreck hardware. The primer for everything that follows.
The German control-systems expert whose team decoded the worm's true target walks through the forensics live on stage — and makes a startling guess about who could possibly have built it.
A ground-level reconstruction of the sabotage inside the enrichment hall — how the code hijacked the programmable logic controllers, spun the centrifuges past their limits, then slowed them, cracking hundreds of machines while operators saw nothing wrong.
The complete dossier: the June 2010 discovery, the codename 'Olympic Games,' the payload's uncanny specificity, and how a weapon meant to stay hidden ended up spreading across the globe.
IEEE Spectrum's deep dive into how a 500-kilobyte worm that had infected at least 14 Iranian sites was reverse-engineered line by line by security researchers who slowly realized what they were looking at.
The founder of the lab that helped dissect the malware explains why Stuxnet terrified him: not because of what it did to Iran, but because it proved critical infrastructure everywhere is now a legitimate target.
The closer: how Stuxnet spawned an entire family of cyberweapons — Duqu, Flame, Havex — and permanently changed what a line of code is capable of doing to the physical world.