Zero Days Page #3

Well, that must be

quite a significant target.

Chien:
So at symantec we have

probes on networks

all over the world

watching for

malicious activity.

O'murchu:
We'd actually seen

infections of stuxnet

all over the world,

in the U.S., Australia,

in the u.K., in France,

Germany, all over Europe.

Chien:
It spread to any windows

machine in the entire world.

You know,

we had these organizations

inside the United States

who were in charge of

industrial control

facilities saying,

"we're infected.

What's gonna happen?"

O'murchu:
We didn't know if

there was a deadline coming up

where this threat

would trigger

and suddenly would,

like, turn off all, you know,

electricity plants

around the world

or it would start

shutting things down

or launching some attack.

We knew that stuxnet could have

very dire consequences,

and we were

very worried about

what the payload

contained

and there was

an imperative speed

that we had to race

and try and, you know,

beat this ticking bomb.

Eventually, we were able to

refine the statistics a little

and we saw that

Iran was the number one

infected country in the world.

Chien:
That immediately raised

our eyebrows.

We had never

seen a threat before

where it was

predominantly in Iran.

And so we began to follow

what was going on

in the geopolitical world,

what was happening

in the general news.

And at that time, there were

actually multiple explosions

of gas pipelines

going in and out of Iran.

Unexplained explosions.

O'murchu:
And of course,

we did notice that at the time

there had been assassinations

of nuclear scientists.

So that was worrying.

We knew there was

something bad happening.

Gibney:
Did you get concerned

for yourself?

I mean, did you begin to start

looking over your shoulder

from time to time?

Yeah, definitely

looking over my shoulder

and... and being careful about

what I spoke about on the phone.

I was... pretty confident

my conversations on my...

On the phone were

being listened to.

We were only half joking

when we would

look at each other

and tell each other

things like,

"look, I'm not suicidal.

If I show up dead on Monday,

you know, it wasn't me."

We'd been publishing

information about stuxnet

all through that summer.

And then in November,

the industrial control system

sort of expert

in Holland contacted us...

And he said all of these

devices that would be inside of

an industrial control system

hold a unique identifier number

that identified the make

and model of that device.

And we actually had a couple

of these numbers in the code

that we didn't know

what they were.

And so we realized

maybe what he was referring to

was the magic numbers we had.

And then when we searched

for those magic numbers

in that context,

we saw that what

had to be connected

to this industrial control

system that was being targeted

were something called

frequency converters

from two

specific manufacturers,

one of which was in Iran.

And so at this time,

we absolutely knew

that the facility

that was being targeted

had to be in Iran

and had equipment made

from iranian manufacturers.

When we looked up

those frequency converters,

we immediately found out

that they were actually

export controlled by the

nuclear regulatory commission.

And that immediately

lead us then

to some nuclear facility.

Gibney:
This was more than

a computer story,

so I left the world

of the antivirus detectives

and sought out journalist,

David sanger,

who specialized in

the strange intersection

of cyber, nuclear weapons,

and espionage.

Sanger:

The emergence of the code

is what put me on alert

that an attack was under way.

And because of the

covert nature of the operation,

not only were official

government spokesmen

unable to talk about it,

they didn't even know about it.

Eventually,

the more I dug into it,

the more I began to find

individuals

who had been involved

in some piece of it

or who had witnessed

some piece of it.

And that meant

talking to Americans,

talking to Israelis,

talking to Europeans,

because this was obviously

the first, biggest,

and most sophisticated

example of a state

or two states

using a cyber weapon

for offensive purposes.

I came to this with

a fair bit of history,

understanding the iranian

nuclear program.

How did Iran get its first

nuclear reactor?

We gave it to them...

Under the shah,

because the shah was considered

an American ally.

Thank you again for your

warm welcome, Mr. president.

Gary samore:
During

the Nixon administration,

the U.S. was very enthusiastic

about supporting

the shah's

nuclear power program.

And at one point,

the Nixon administration

was pushing the idea

that Pakistan and Iran

should build a joint plant

together in Iran.

There's at least

some evidence that

the shah was thinking about

acquisition of nuclear weapons,

because he saw, and we were

encouraging him to see Iran

as the so-called policemen

of the persian Gulf.

And the iranians have always

viewed themselves

as naturally the dominant power

in the middle east.

Samore:
But the revolution,

which overthrew

the shah in '79,

really curtailed the program

before it ever got any

head of steam going.

Part of our policy against Iran

after the revolution

was to deny them

nuclear technology.

So most of the period

when I was involved

in the '80s and the '90s

was the U.S. running

around the world

and persuading potential

nuclear suppliers

not to provide even peaceful

nuclear technology to Iran.

And what we missed

was the clandestine transfer

in the mid-1980s

from Pakistan to Iran.

Rolf mowatt-larssen:

Abdul qadeer Khan

is what we would call

the father of

the Pakistan nuclear program.

He had the full authority

and confidence

of the Pakistan government

from its inception

to the production

of nuclear weapons.

I was a CIA officer for...

For...

For over two decades,

operations officer,

worked overseas

most of my career.

The a.Q. Khan network

is so notable

because aside from building

the Pakistani program

for decades...

It also was the means

by which other countries

were able to develop

nuclear weapons,

including Iran.

Samore:

A.Q. Khan acting on behalf

of the Pakistani government

negotiated

with officials in Iran

and then there was a transfer

which took place

through Dubai

of blueprints for

nuclear weapons design

as well as some hardware.

Throughout the mid-1980s,

the iranian program

was not very well-resourced.

It was more of

an r & d program.

It wasn't really

until the mid-'90s

that it started to take off

when they made the decision

to build the nuclear weapons

program.

You know,

we can speculate what,

in their mind,

motivated them.

I think it was

the U.S. invasion of Iraq

after Kuwait.

You know, there was an

eight-year war

between Iraq and Iran,

we had wiped out Saddam's

forces in a matter of weeks.

And I think that was enough

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