Who did Stuxnet?

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They should teach hacking in school so children are prepared for the real world.

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In 2011, the US government rolled out its "International Strategy for Cyberspace," which reminded us that "interconnected networks link nations more closely, so an attack on one nation’s networks may have impact far beyond its borders." An in-depth report today from the New York Times confirms the truth of that statement as it finally lays bare the history and development of the Stuxnet virus—and how it accidentally escaped from the Iranian nuclear facility that was its target.

The article is adapted from journalist David Sanger's forthcoming book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, and it confirms that both the US and Israeli governments developed and deployed Stuxnet. The goal of the worm was to break Iranian nuclear centrifuge equipment by issuing specific commands to the industrial control hardware responsible for their spin rate. By doing so, both governments hoped to set back the Iranian research program—and the US hoped to keep Israel from launching a pre-emptive military attack.

The code was only supposed to work within Iran's Natanz refining facility, which was air-gapped from outside networks and thus difficult to penetrate. But computers and memory cards could be carried between the public Internet and the private Natanz network, and a preliminary bit of "beacon" code was used to map out all the network connections within the plant and report them back to the NSA.

That program, first authorized by George W. Bush, worked well enough to provide a digital map of Natanz and its industrial control hardware. Soon, US national labs were testing different bits of the plan to sabotage Natanz (apparently without knowing what the work was for) using similar centrifuges that had come from Libya's Qadaffi regime. When the coders found the right sets of commands to literally shake the centrifuges apart, they knew that Stuxnet could work.

When ready, Stuxnet was introduced to Natanz, perhaps by a double agent.

Read More: Confirmed: US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it

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The United States and Israel jointly developed the Flame espionage malware to collect information that would be useful in disrupting Iran's nuclear program, the Washington Post reported, citing unnamed Western officials with knowledge of the operation.

While important, the report isn't entirely unexpected. Researchers said last week they had conclusive proof that developers of Flame collaborated with developers of Stuxnet, the highly sophisticated computer worm that targeted uranium enrichment operations in Iran's Natanz nuclear facility. A week before that, an in-depth article in the New York Times provided the first confirmation that Stuxnet was created by the US and Israel before they ultimately lost control of it. Flame was part of "Olympic Games," the same classified effort that spawned Stuxnet, Washington Post journalists Ellen Nakashima, Greg Miller, and Julie Tate reported Tuesday.

Read more: Flame created by US and Israel