A new documentary on “Stuxnet”, the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program, reveals it was just a small part of a much bigger cyber operation against the nation’s military and civilian infrastructure under the code name “NITRO ZEUS”.
Stuxnet was the name security researchers gave to the computer worm used by the U.S. and Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.
Jigsaw Productions
The United States hacked into critical civilian and military infrastructure in Iran to allow its operatives to disable the country with a devastating series of cyberattacks at a moment's notice, a documentary will claim this week.
The targets of the U.S. hacking operations, covered by the code name "NITRO ZEUS," include power plants, transport infrastructure, and air defenses, the film will state, with agents entering these protected systems nightly to make sure the attacks were still deployable.
The film, Zero Days, by Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney, which is set to premiere at the Berlin film festival on Wednesday, will claim that the U.S.-Israel "Stuxnet" worm — which destroyed around 1 in 5 of the centrifuges used in Iran's nuclear program — was just a small part of a much larger set of offensive capabilities developed against the nation.
Citing at least five confidential U.S. military or intelligence sources with direct knowledge of the programs, the film claims:
• U.S. hackers working from the Remote Operations Center (ROC) in Fort Meade, Maryland, have penetrated huge swaths of Iran's critical infrastructure, and were ready to launch disabling attacks alongside any military operation;
• Some within the State Department and the National Security Agency (NSA) expressed concern around the legality and ethics of some of these operations, which risked disabling civilian as well as military infrastructure;
• Israel modified the Stuxnet worm, targeted at Iranian nuclear facilities, making it far more aggressive, then unilaterally launched the new version. This was the one discovered by security researchers, who eventually traced it back to the two nations' intelligence agencies;
• Intelligence from the UK's GCHQ agency was used in deploying Stuxnet against Iranian facilities.
BuzzFeed News received an advance viewing of Gibney's film, and was given access to additional reporting material and research notes used for its production. These materials have been supplemented by independent reporting, including from previously published NSA documents from the cache leaked by Edward Snowden.
Iran's nuclear facility in Natanz was the primary target of "Olympic Games", the official code name for the Stuxnet program.
Jigsaw Productions
"Stuxnet" was the name given to an unusually sophisticated computer worm when it was discovered by security researchers in 2010. The code was unprecedentedly complex, and included four "zero days" — previously unknown vulnerabilities that guarantee an attack's success and trade for hundreds of thousands of dollars a time on the black market.
Researchers quickly concluded that due to its complexity and use of valuable, previously unknown vulnerabilities, it was almost certainly the work of one or more state actors.
Eventually, it was revealed the Stuxnet worm was the product of a long collaboration between the U.S. and Israel, code-named "Olympic Games", to tackle Iran's nuclear program without resorting to airstrikes or assassinations, both of which Israel had previously deployed or considered in its bid to stall Iran's progress.
The worm worked by changing the programming of the computers controlling the centrifuges used to enrich uranium, reporting back normal behaviors to the facility's operators while actually implanting a series of destructive actions, including even causing the centrifuges to speed up until the pressure on the system's delicate components caused them to explode.
Both nations, the film reports, had full and independent access to the source code of the worm, which in its earlier versions did not spread aggressively, helping keep it contained and undiscoverable.
When a version infected numerous unintended targets in 2009, the workers in the ROC switched almost full-time to silently cleaning up infected computers to prevent the worm's discovery — for fears this would lead to researchers determining who was behind it, potentially prompting retaliatory measures.
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