Original subtitles

Through the darkness of the pathways that we march,

evil and good live side by side, and this is the nature of life.

We are in an unbalanced, an unequivalent confrontation between democracies who

are obliged to play by the rules and entities who think democracy is a joke.

You can't convince fanatics by saying, hey, hatred

paralyzes you, love relifts you.

There are different rules that we have to play by.

Today, two of Iran's top nuclear scientists were targeted by hit squads.

Today's attack has all the hallmarks of major strategic sabotage. Iran

immediately accused the U .S. and Israel of trying to damage its nuclear

program.

I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind

of act of violence inside Iran.

Covert actions can help, can assist.

They are needed. They are not all the time essentials.

They in no way can replace their political wisdom.

Were the assassinations in Iran related to the Stuxnet computer attacks?

Next question, please.

I don't know.

No one knows who's behind the worm and the exact nature of its mission, but

there are fears Iran will hold Israel or America responsible and seek

retaliation. It's not impossible that some group of hackers did it, but the

security experts that are studying this really think this required the resources

of a nation state.

Okay, good.

Here we go.

What impact, ultimately, did the Duxnet attack have?

Can you say?

I don't want to get into the detail.

The event has already happened. Why can't we talk more openly and publicly

Duxnet? Yeah. I mean, my answer is because it's classified.

I won't knowledge, you know, knowingly offer up anything I consider classified.

I know that you can't talk much about Duxnet because Duxnet is officially

classified. You're right on both those counts.

But there has been a lot reported about it in the press.

I don't want to comment on this. I read it in the newspapers, in the media like

you, but I'm unable to elaborate upon it.

People might find it frustrating not to be able to talk about it when it's in

the public domain, but...

I find it frustrating. Yeah, I'm sure you do.

I don't answer that question.

Unfortunately, I can't comment.

I do not know how to answer that. Two answers before we even get started. I

don't know, and if I did, we wouldn't talk about it anyway.

But how can you have a debate if everything is secret?

I think right now that's just where we are.

No one wants to... Countries aren't happy about confessing or owning up to

they did because they're not quite sure where they want the system to go.

And so whoever was behind Stuxnet hasn't admitted they were behind it.

Asking officials about Stuxnet was frustrating and surreal, like asking the

emperor about his new clothes.

Even after the cyber weapon had penetrated computers all over the world,

was willing to admit that it was loose or to talk about the dangers it posed.

What was it about the Stuxnet operation that was hiding in plain sight?

Maybe there was a way the computer code could speak for itself.

Stuxnet first surfaced in Belarus.

I started with a call to the man who discovered it when his clients in Iran

began to panic over an epidemic of computer shutdowns.

Had you ever seen anything quite so sophisticated before?

It was firstly in my practice.

On a day -to -day basis, basically, we are sifting through a massive haystack

looking for that verbal needle.

We get millions of pieces of new malicious threats, and there are

attacks going on every single day.

And not only are we trying to protect people and their computers and their

systems and countries' infrastructure from being taken down by those attacks,

but more importantly, we have to find the attacks that matter. And we're

about that many.

impact is extremely important.

Twenty years ago, the antivirus companies, they were hunting for

viruses because there were not so many. So we had like a tenth of a dozen a

month, and there was just a little number. Now we collect millions of

attacks. every month this room we call a woodpecker's room or virus lab

and this is where virus analysts we call them woodpeckers because they are

packing the worms network worms and viruses we see like three different

of actors behind cyber attacks they are traditional cyber criminals those guys

are interested only in illegal profit and quick and dirty money activists or

hacktivists They are hacking for fun or hacking to push some political message.

And the third group is nation -state.

They are interested in high -quality intelligence or sabotage activity.

Security companies not only share information, but we also share binary

So when this threat was found by a Belarusian security company on one of

customers' machines in Iran, the sample was shared amongst the security

community.

When we try to name threats, we just try to pick some sort of string, some sort

of word.

that are inside of the binary.

In this case, there were a couple of words in there.

We took pieces of each, and that formed Stuxnet.

I got the news about Stuxnet from one of my engineers.

He came to my office, opened the door, and he said, So, Eugene, of course you

know we are waiting for something really bad.

It happened.

some sense of what it was like in the lab at that time. Was there a palpable

sense of amazement that you had something really different there?

Well, I wouldn't call it amazement. It was kind of a talk.

It went beyond our worst fears, our worst nightmares.

And this continued. The more we analyzed, the more we researched, the

bizarre the whole story got.

We look at so much malware every day that we can just look at the code and

straight away you can say, okay, there's something bad going on here and I need

to investigate that. And that's the way it was when we looked at Success for the

first time. We opened it up and there was just bad things everywhere.

Just like, okay, this is bad and that's bad and, you know, we need to

investigate this. And just suddenly we had like 100 questions straight away.

The most interesting thing that we do is the detective work, where we try to

track down who's behind a threat, what are they doing, what's their motivation,

and try to really stop it at the root.

And it is kind of all -consuming. You get this new puzzle, and it's very

difficult to put it down. You know, work until like 4 a .m. in the morning and

figure these things out. And I was in that zone where I was very consumed by

this, very excited about it, very interested to know what was happening.

And Eric was also in that same sort of zone. So the two of us were like back

forth all the time.

Liam and I continued to grind at the code, sharing pieces, comparing notes,

bouncing ideas off of each other.

We realized that we needed to do what we call deep analysis.

Pick apart the threat, every single byte, every single zero one, and

everything that was inside of it.

And just give you some context.

We can go through and understand every line of code for the average threat in

minutes. And here we are one month into this threat, and we're just starting to

discover what we call the payload, or its whole purpose.

When looking at the Stuxnet code, 20 times the size of the average piece of

code, but contains almost no bugs inside of it. And that's extremely rare,

because code always has bugs inside of it.

This wasn't the case with Stuxnet. It's dense, and every piece of code does

something, and does something right in order to conduct its attack.

One of the things that surprised us, was that Sexnet utilized what's called a

zero -day exploit, or basically a piece of code that allows it to spread without

you having to do anything.

You don't have to, for example, download a file and run it. A zero -day exploit

is an exploit that nobody knows about except the attacker. So there's no

protection against it. There's been no patch released. There's been zero days

protection, you know, against it.

That's what attackers value, because they know 100 % if they have this.

Zero -day exploits. They can get in wherever they want.

They're actually very valuable.

You can sell these in the underground for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Then we became more worried because immediately we discovered more zero

And again, these zero -days are extremely rare.

Inside Stuxnet, we had four zero -days, and for the entire rest of the year, we

only saw 12 zero -days used. It blows everything else out of the water. We've

never seen this before. Actually, we've never seen it since either.

Seeing one in a malware you could understand because...

You know, the malware authors are making money. They're stealing people's credit

cards and making money. So it's worth their while to use it. But seeing four

zero days could be worth half a million dollars right there used in one piece of

malware. This is not your ordinary criminal gang doing this. This is

bigger. It's definitely not traditional crime, not hacktivism.

Who else?

It was evident on a very early stage that just given the sophistication of

malware,

suggested that there must have been a nation state involved, at least one

state involved in the development.

When we look at code that's coming from what appears to be a state attacker or

state -sponsored attacker, usually they're scrubbed clean.

They don't leave little bits behind.

They don't leave little hints behind.

But in Stuxnet, there were actually a few hints left behind.

One was that in order to get low -level access to Microsoft Windows, Stuxnet

needed to use a digital certificate.

which certifies that this piece of code came from a particular company.

Now, those attackers obviously couldn't go to Microsoft and say, hey, test our

code out for us and give us a digital certificate.

So they essentially stole them from two companies in Taiwan.

And these two companies have nothing to do with each other except for their

close proximity in the exact same business park.

Digital certificates are guarded very, very closely.

Behind multiple doors, and they require multiple people to unlock.

And they need to provide both biometrics and as well passphrases.

It wasn't like those certificates were just sitting on a machine connected to

the internet.

Some human asset had to be involved.

Spies, like a cleaner who comes in at night and has stolen these certificates

from these companies.

It did feel like walking onto the set of this James Bond movie and...

You've been embroiled in this thing that you'd never expected.

We continued to search and we continued to search in the code and eventually we

found some other breadcrumbs left that we were able to follow.

There was doing something with Siemens, Siemens software, possibly Siemens

hardware. We'd never ever seen that in any malware before, something targeting

Siemens. We didn't even know why they would be doing that.

But after Googling very quickly, we understood it was targeting Siemens

It was targeting a very specific hardware device, something called a PLC,

programmable logic controller.

The PLC is kind of a very small computer attached to physical equipment like

pumps, like valves, like motors.

So this little box is running a digital program, and the actions of this

program... turns that motor on or off or sets a specific speed.

Those program logic controllers control things like power plant, power grid.

This is used in factories, it's used in critical infrastructure.

Critical infrastructure is everywhere around us.

Transportation, telecommunication, financial services, healthcare.

So the payload of TaxNet was designed to attack some very important part

of our world.

the payload is going to be important what happens there could be very

the next very big surprise came when we infected our lab

system we figured out that the malware was probing the controllers it was quite

picky on its target it didn't try to manipulate any given controller in a

network that it would see it went through several checks and when those

failed It would not implement the attack.

It was obviously probing for a specific target.

You've got to put this in context that at the time we already knew, well, this

is the most sophisticated piece of malware that we have ever seen.

So it's kind of strange. Somebody takes that huge effort to hit one specific

target. Well, that must be quite a significant target.

So at Symantec, we have probes on networks all over the world watching for

malicious activity.

We'd actually seen infections of stuff all over the world, in the U .S., in

Australia, in the U .K., in France, Germany, all over Europe.

It spread to any Windows machine in the entire world.

You know, we had these organizations inside the United States who were in

of industrial control facilities saying, we're infected, what's going to happen?

We didn't know if there was a deadline coming up where this threat would

and suddenly would turn off all electricity plants around the world or

start shutting things down or launching some attack.

We knew that Stuxnet could have very dire consequences and we were very

about what the payload contained and there was an imperative speed that we

to race and try and beat this ticking bomb.

Eventually, we were able to refine the statistics a little bit and we saw that

Iran was the number one infected country in the world. 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

in and out of Iran.

Unexplained explosions.

And, of course, we did notice that at the time there had been assassinations

nuclear scientists.

So that was worrying.

We knew there was something bad happening.

Did you get concerned for yourself? I mean, did you begin to start looking

your shoulder from time to time?

Yeah, definitely looking over my shoulder and being careful about what I

about on the phone.

I was pretty confident my conversations 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

suicidal if I show up dead on Monday. You know, it wasn't me.

We've been publishing information about sexnet 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 identifies 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

And then when we searched for those magic numbers in that context, we saw

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 it had equipment made from Iranian

manufacturers.

When we looked up those frequency converters, we immediately found out

were actually export -controlled by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

And that immediately led us then to some nuclear facility.

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.

The emergence of the code is what put me on alert that an attack was underway.

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

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

And that meant talking to Americans, talking to Israelis, talking to

because this was obviously the first, biggest, and most sophisticated example

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

program.

How did Iran get its first nuclear reactor?

We gave it to them, under the Shah, because the Shah was considered an

ally.

Thank you again for your warm welcome, Mr. President.

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

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 policeman of the

Persian Gulf. And the Iranians have always viewed themselves as naturally

dominant power in the Middle East.

But the revolution which overthrew the Sharan 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.

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.

Abdul Qadir 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 over two decades, operations officer, worked

most of my career.

The AQ Khan network is so notable because aside from building the

program for decades, it also was the means by which other countries,

were able to develop nuclear weapons, including Iran.

AQ Khan, acting on behalf of the Pakistani government, negotiated with

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 a nuclear weapons program.

You know, we can speculate what, in their mind, motivated them. I think it

the U .S. invasion of Iraq after Kuwait.

There was an eight -year war between Iraq and Iran.

We wiped out the Afghan forces in a matter of weeks.

And I think that was enough to convince the rulers in Tehran that they needed to

pursue nuclear weapons more seriously.

States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil,

to threaten the peace of the world.

From 2003 to 2005, when they feared that the U .S. would invade them, they

accepted limits on their nuclear program.

But by 2006, the Iranians had come to the conclusion that the U .S. was bogged

down in Afghanistan and Iraq and no longer had the capacity to threaten

And so they felt it was safe to resume their enrichment program.

They started producing low -enriched uranium, producing more centrifuges,

installing them at the large -scale underground enrichment facility at

Today, with the support of the president, he made this possible for us.

They say, well, you have to negotiate with us for 10 years, and then we will

allow you to have 20 of these or not.

Of course, the people of Iran do not accept it. And today, about 7 ,000 of

teams are working in Tunisia.

Not that many, because I left a few years ago already, but I was there quite

few times.

Natanzi is just in the middle of the desert.

When they were building it in secret, they were calling it a desert irrigation

facility. For the local people, you want to sell while you are building a big

complex.

There is a lot of artillery and air force.

It's better protected against attack from air than any other nuclear

installation I have seen.

So this is deeply underground.

But then inside, Natanzi is like any other centrifuge facility. I have been

over the world, from Brazil to Russia, Japan, so...

They are all alike with their own features,

their own centrifuges, their own culture, but basically the process is

And so are the monitoring activities of the IAEA. They are basic principles. You

want to see what goes in, what goes out, and then on top of that you make sure

that it produces low -end uranium instead of anything to do with the

enrichment and nuclear weapon -grade uranium.

Iran's nuclear facilities are under 24 -hour watch of the United Nations

watchdog, the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Every single gram of Iranian fissile material is accounted

for.

They have, like, basically seals that they put on fissile materials that are

IAEA seals.

You can't break anything.

without getting noticed.

When you look at the uranium which was there in Natanz, it was a very special

uranium. This is called isotope 236.

And that was a puzzle to us because you only see this sort of uranium in states

which have had nuclear weapons.

We realized that they had cheated us.

This sort of...

equipment has been bought from what they call black market they never pointed

out it to aq card at that point of time

what i was surprised was the

sophistication and the quality control and the way they have the manufacturing

it was really professional it was not something you know you just create in a

few months time this was a result of a long process.

The centrifuges, you feed uranium gas in and you have a cascade, thousands of

centrifuges and from the other end you get enriched uranium out.

It separates uranium based on spinning the rotor.

It spins so fast.

300 meters per second. The same as the velocity of sound.

These are tremendous forces, and as a result, the rotor, it twists.

It looks like a banana at one point in time.

So it has to be in balance because any small vibration, it will blow up.

And here comes another trouble.

You have to raise the temperature, but these very thin rotor walls, they are

made from carbon fiber, and the other pieces, they are made from metal.

When you heat carbon fiber, it shrinks.

When you heat metal, it expands.

So you need to balance not only that they spin, they twist, but the

behavior in such a way that it doesn't break.

So this has to be very precise.

This is what makes them very difficult to manufacture.

You can model it, you can calculate it, but at the very end, it's actually based

on practice.

So it's a piece of art, so to say.

Iranians are very proud of their centric racism.

There were a lot of public relations videos given up always in April when

had what they call a national nuclear day.

Ahmadinejad came into his presidency saying that if the international

wants to derail us, we will stand up to it.

If they want us to sign more inspections and more additional protocols and other

measures, no, we will not.

We will fight for our rights.

Iran is the signatory to the Nuclear Non -Proliferation Treaty, and under that

treaty, Iran has a right to nuclear program.

We can have enrichment.

Who are you, world powers, to come and tell us that we cannot have enrichment?

This was his mantra, and it galvanized the public.

By 2007, 2008, the U .S. government was in a very bad place with the Iranian

program.

President Bush recognized that he could not even come out in public and declare

that the Iranians were building a nuclear weapon because by this time he

gone through the entire WMD fiasco in Iraq.

He could not really take military action.

Condoleezza Rice said to him at one point, you know, Mr. President, I think

you've invaded your last Muslim country, even for the best of reasons.

He didn't want to let the Israelis conduct a military operation.

It's 1938, and Iran is Germany, and it's racing to

arm itself with atomic bombs.

Iran's nuclear ambitions must be stopped.

They have to be stopped.

We all have to stop it now. That's the one message I have for you today. Thank

you.

Israel was saying they were going to bomb Iran.

And the government here in Washington did all sorts of scenarios about what

would happen if that Israeli attack occurred.

They were all very ugly scenarios.

Our belief was that if they went on their own, knowing the limitations,

a very good air force, all right, but it's small and the distances are great

the target's dispersed and hardened, all right, if they would have attempted a

raid.

On a military plane, we would have been assuming that they were assuming we

would finish that which they started.

In other words, there will be many of us in government thinking that the purpose

of the raid wasn't to destroy the Iranian nuclear system, but the purpose

raid was to put us at war with Iran.

Israel is very much concerned about Iran's nuclear program more than the

States. It's only natural because of the size of the country, because we live in

this neighborhood. America lives thousands and thousands of miles away

Iran. The two countries agreed on the goal. There is no page between

us that Iran should not have a nuclear military capability.

There are some differences.

on how to achieve it and when action is needed.

We are taking very seriously leaders of countries who call to the destruction

and annihilation of our people.

If Iran will get nuclear weapons now or in the future.

It means that for the first time in human history, Islamic zealots,

zealots, will get their hand on the most dangerous, devastating weapon.

And the world should prevent this.

The Israelis believe that the Iranian leadership has already made the decision

to build nuclear weapons when they think they can get away with it.

The view in the U .S. is that the Iranians haven't made that final

To me, that doesn't make any difference.

I mean, it really doesn't make any difference, and it's probably unknowable

unless you can put, you know, Supreme Leader Khamenei on the couch and

him. I think, you know, from our standpoint, stopping Iran from getting

threshold capacity is, you know, the primary policy objective.

Once they have the material, once they have the capacity to produce nuclear

weapons, then the game is lost.

President Bush once said to me, he says, Mike, I don't want any president ever

to be faced with only two options, bombing or the bomb.

He wanted options that made it far less likely he or his

successor.

or successors would ever get to that point where that's all you've got.

We wanted to be energetic enough in pursuing this problem that the Israelis

would certainly believe, yeah, we get it. The intelligence cooperation between

Israel and the United States is very, very good.

And therefore the Israelis went to the Americans and said, okay, guys, you

want us to bomb Iran?

Okay, let's do it differently.

And then the American intelligence community started rolling and joined

with the Israeli intelligence community.

One day, a group of intelligence and military officials showed up in

Bush's office and said, Sir, we have an idea.

It's a big risk.

It might not work, but here it is.

Moving forward in my analysis of the code, I took a closer look at the

photographs that had been published by the Iranians themselves in a press tour

from 2008, Ahmadinejad and the Chinese centrifuges.

The photographs of Ahmadinejad going through the centrifuges at Natanz

some very important clues.

There was a huge amount to be learned.

First of all, those photographs showed many of the individuals who were guiding

Ahmadinejad through the program.

And there's one very famous photograph that shows Ahmadinejad being shown

something. You see his face. You can't see what's on the computer.

And one of the scientists who was behind him.

Was it fascinated a few months later?

In one of those photographs, you could see parts of a computer screen.

We refer to that as a SCADA screen.

The SCADA system is basically a piece of software running on a computer.

It enables the operators to monitor the process.

What you could see, when you look close enough,

was a more detailed view of the configuration.

There were the six groups of centrifuges, and each group had 164

And guess what?

That was a perfect match to what we saw in the attack code.

It was absolutely clear that this piece of code was attacking an array with...

six different groups of, let's just say, thingies, physical objects.

And in those six groups, there were 164 elements.

Were you able to do any actual physical tests?

Or it was all just a code analysis?

Yeah. So, you know, we obviously couldn't set up our own sort of nuclear

enrichment facility.

But what we did was we did obtain some PLCs, the exact models.

We then ordered an air pump, and that's what we used as our proof of concept.

We needed a visual demonstration to show people what we discovered.

So we thought of different things that we could do, and we settled on blowing

a balloon.

We were able to write a program that would inflate a balloon, and it was set

stop after five seconds.

So it would inflate the balloon to a certain size, but it wouldn't burst the

balloon, and it was all safe.

And we showed everybody, this is the code that's on the PLC, and the timer

stop after five seconds. We know that's what's going to happen.

And then we would infect the computer with Stuxnet, and we would run the test

again.

Here is a piece of software that should only exist in the cyber realm, and it is

able to affect physical equipment in a plant or factory and cause physical

damage. Real -world physical destruction.

At that time, things became very scary to us. Here you had malware potentially

killing people, and that was something that was always Hollywood -esque to us,

that we'd always laugh at when people made that kind of assertion.

At this point, you had to have started developing theories as to who had built

them.

It wasn't lost on us that there were probably only a few countries in the

that would want and have the motivation to sabotage Iranian nuclear enrichment

facility. The U .S. government would be up there. Israeli government certainly

would be up there. You know, maybe U .K., France, Germany, those sorts of

countries. But we never found any information that would... tie it back

those countries.

There are no telltale signs.

You know, the attackers don't leave a message inside saying, you know, it was

me.

And even if they did,

all that stuff can be faked.

So it's very, very difficult to do attribution when looking at computer

Subsequent work that's been done leads us to believe that this was the work of

collaboration between Israel and the United States. Did you have any evidence

terms of your analysis that would lead you to...

Believe that that's correct also?

Nothing that I could talk about on camera.

Can I ask why?

No.

You can, but I won't answer.

But even in the case of nation states, one of the concerns is... This was

beginning to really piss me off.

Even civilians with an interest in telling the Stuxnet story were refusing

address the role of Tel Aviv and Washington.

But luckily for me, while D .C. is a city of secrets, it is also a city of

leaks. They're as regular as a heartbeat and just as hard to stop.

That's what I was counting on.

Finally, after speaking to a number of people on background, I did find a way

confirming on the record the American role in Stuxnet.

In exchange for details of the operation,

I had to agree to find a way to disguise the source of the information.

You good?

We're off.

The first question I have to ask you is about secrecy.

I mean, at this point, everyone knows about the document.

Why can't we talk about it?

It's a covert operation.

Not anymore. I mean, we know what happened. We know who did it.

Well, maybe you don't know as much as you think you know.

Well, I'm talking to you because I want to get the story right.

Well, that's the same reason I'm talking to you.

Even though it's a covert operation.

Look, this is not a Snowden kind of thing, okay? I think what he did was

He went too far.

He gave away too much.

Unlike Snowden, who was a contractor, I was in NSA.

I believe in the agency, so what I'm willing to give you will be limited, but

we're talking because everyone's getting this story wrong, and we have to get it

right. We have to understand these new weapons. The stakes are too high.

What do you mean?

We did stuck in that.

It's a fact.

We came so fucking close to disaster, and we're still on the edge.

It was a huge, multinational...

interagency operation in the u .s it was cia nfa

and the military cyber command from britain we used iran intel out of gchq

but the main partner was israel over there massad ran the show and the

work was done by unit 8200 israel is really the key to the story

Traffic in Israel is so unpredictable.

Yossi, how did you get into this whole Stuxnet story?

I have been covering the Israeli intelligence in general and the Mossad

particular for nearly 30 years.

In 1982, I was a London -based correspondent and I covered a trial of

and I became more familiar with this topic of terrorism.

Slowly but surely, I started covering it as a beat.

Israel, we live in a very rough neighborhood where democratic values,

values are very rare.

But Israel pretends to be a free, democratic, westernized society.

Posh neighborhoods, rich people, youngsters who are...

having almost similar mindset to their American or Western European

counterparts. On the other hand, you see a lot of scenes and events which

resemble the real Middle East.

Terror attacks, radicals, fanatics, religious zealots.

I knew that Israel is trying to slow down Iran's nuclear program, and

I came to the conclusion that if there was a virus affecting Iran's computers,

it's one more element in this larger picture based

on past precedents.

1981, I was a F -16 pilot.

We were told that unlike our dream to do dogfights and to kill pigs,

we have to be prepared for a long -range mission to destroy a valuable

target. Nobody told us what is this very valuable strategic target.

It was 600 miles from Israel.

So we trained ourselves.

to do the job, which was very difficult. No air refueling at that time. No

satellite for reconnaissance.

Fuel was on the limit.

At the end of the day, we accomplished the mission.

Which was?

To destroy the Iraqi nuclear reactor near Baghdad.

which was called Ost -Iraq, and Iraq never was able to

accomplish its ambition to have a nuclear bomb.

Amos Yadlin, General Yadlin, he was the head of the military intelligence.

The biggest unit within that organization is Unit H -200.

They bug telephones, they bug faxes, they break into computers.

A decade ago, when Yardim became the chief of military intelligence, there

no cyber warfare unit in H -200.

So they started recruiting very talented people, hackers, either from the

military or outside the military, that can contribute to the project of

a cyber warfare unit.

In the 19th century, there were only army and navy.

In the 20th century, we got air power as a third dimension of war.

In the 21st century, cyber will be the fourth dimension of war.

It's another kind of weapon, and it is for unlimited range, in a very high

speed, and in a very low signature.

So this gives you a huge opportunity.

And the superpowers have to change the way we think about war.

Finally, we are transforming our military for a new kind of war that

fighting now and for wars of tomorrow.

We have made our military better trained, better equipped, and better

to meet the threats facing America today and tomorrow and long in the future.

Back in the end of the Bush administration, people within the U .S.

were just beginning to convince President Bush to pour money into

cyber weapons.

Stuxnet started off in the Defense Department.

Then Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense, reviewed this program and he said, this

program shouldn't be in the Defense Department. This should really be under

covert authorities over in the intelligence world.

So the CIA was very deeply involved in this operation.

While much of the coding work was done by the National Security Agency and Unit

8200, its Israeli equivalent, working together with a newly created military

position called U .S. Cyber Command.

And interestingly, the director of the National Security Agency would also have

a second role as the commander.

of U .S. Cyber Command.

And U .S. Cyber Command is located at Fort Meade in the same building as the

NSA.

I was deployed for a year giving advice on air operations in Iraq and

Afghanistan. And when I was returning home after that, the assignment I was

given was to go to U .S. Cyber Command.

Cyber Command is the...

military command that's responsible for essentially conducting the nation's

military affairs in cyberspace.

The stated reason the United States decided it needed a cyber command was

because of an event called Operation Buckshot Yankee.

In the fall of 2008, we found some adversaries inside of our classified

networks.

While it wasn't completely true that we always assumed that we were successful

at defending things at the barrier, at the kind of perimeter that we might have

between our networks and the outside world, there was a large confidence that

we'd been mostly successful.

But that was a moment in time when we came to the quick conclusion that it's

really ever secure.

That then accelerated the Department of Defense's progress towards what

ultimately became Cyber Command.

Good morning, sir.

Team Cyber has one item for you today.

Earlier this week, NTOC analysts detected a foreign adversary using known

methods to access the U .S. military network.

We identified the malicious activity via data collected through our information

assurance and signals intelligence authorities and confirmed it was a cyber

adversary. We provide data to our cyber partners within the DOD. If you think of

NSA as an institution that essentially uses its abilities in cyberspace to help

defend communications in that space, Cyber Command extends that capability by

saying that they will then take responsibility to attack.

NSA has no legal authority to attack.

It's never had it. I doubt that it ever will.

It might explain why U .S. Cyber Command is sitting out at Fort Meade on top of

the National Security Agency.

Because NSA has the ability to do these things, Cyber Command has the authority

to do these things. And these things here refer to the cyber attack.

This is a huge change for the nature of the intelligence agencies.

The NSA was supposed to be a code -making and code -breaking operation to

monitor the communications of foreign powers and American adversaries in the

defense of the United States.

But creating a cyber command meant using the same technology to do offense.

Once you get inside an adversary's computer networks, you put an implant in

network. And we have tens of thousands of foreign computers and networks that

the United States has put implants in.

You can use it to monitor what's going across that network.

And you can use it to insert cyber weapons, malware.

If you can spy on a network, you can manipulate it.

It's already included.

The only thing you need is an act of will.

It played a role in Iraq.

I can't tell you whether it was military or not, but I can tell you NFA had

combat support teams in country.

And for the first time, units in the field had direct access to NSA intel.

Over time, we thought more about offense than defense, you know, more about

attacking than intelligence.

In the old days, SIGINT units would try to track radios, but through NSA in

Iraq, we had access to all the networks going in and out of the country. We

hoovered off every text message, email, and phone call.

the complete surveillance state.

We could find the bad guys, say a gang making IEDs, map their networks, and

follow them in real time.

We could lock into cell phones even when they were off, send a fake text from a

friend, suggest a meeting place, and then capture or kill.

A lot of the people that came to cyber command the military guys, came directly

from an assignment in Afghanistan or Iraq, because those are the people with

experience and expertise in operations, and those are the ones you want looking

at this to see how cyber could facilitate traditional military

Fresh from the surge, I went to work at NSA in 07 in a supervisory capacity.

Exactly where did you work?

Fort Meade. You know, I commuted to that massive complex every single day.

I was in TAO S321, The Rock.

Okay, the TAO, The Rock?

Right, sorry. TAO is Tailored Access Operations.

It's where NSA's hackers work.

Of course, we didn't call them that.

What did you call it?

On -net operators.

They're the only people at NSA allowed to break in or attack on the internet.

Inside TAO headquarters is the ROC, Remote Operations Center.

If the US government wants to get in somewhere, it goes to the ROC.

I mean, we were flooded with requests.

So many that we could only do about 30 % of the missions that were requested of

us at one time.

through the web, but also by hijacking shipments of parts.

Sometimes the CIA would assist in putting implants in machines.

So once inside a target network, we could just watch,

or we could attack.

Inside NSA was a strange kind of culture.

Two parts macho military and two parts cyber geek.

I mean, I came from Iraq, so I was used to, yes, sir, no, sir, but for the

weapons programmers, we needed more think -outside -the -box types.

From cubicle to cubicle, you'd see lightsabers, tribbles, Naruto action

lots of Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

This one guy, they were mostly guys.

who liked to wear a yellow hooded cape.

He used a ton of gray Legos to build a massive Death Star.

Were they all working on Stuxnet?

We never called it Stuxnet. That was the name invented by the antivirus guys.

When it hit the papers, We're not allowed to read about classified

even if it's in the New York Times. We went out of our way to avoid the term. I

mean, saying Stuxnet out loud was like saying Voldemort in Harry Potter, the

name that shall not be spoken.

What did you call it then?

The Natanz attack, and this is out there already, was called Olympic Games,

or OG.

There was a huge operation to test the code on PLCs here at Fort Meade and in

Sandia, New Mexico.

Remember during the Bush era when Libya turned over all of its centrifuges?

Those were the same models the Iranians got from AQ Khan, P1s.

We took them to Oak Ridge and used them to test the code, just demolish the

inside.

At Dimona, The Israelis also tested on the P -1s.

Then, partly by using our intel on Iran, we got the plans for the newer models,

the IR -2s.

We cut out different attack vectors.

We ended up focusing on ways to destroy the rotor tubes.

In the tests we ran, we blew them apart.

They swept up the pieces.

They put it on an airplane.

They flew it to Washington.

They stuck it in the truck, they drove it through the gates of the White House,

and dumped the shards out on the conference room table in the Situation

And then they invited President Bush to come down and take a look.

And when he could pick up the shard of a piece of centrifuge, he was convinced

this might be worth it.

And he said, go ahead and try.

Was there legal concern inside the Bush administration that this might be an act

of undeclared war?

If there were concerns, I haven't found them.

That doesn't mean that they didn't exist and that some lawyers somewhere were

concerned about it, but this was an entirely new territory.

At the time, there were really very few people who had expertise specifically on

the law of war and cyber.

And basically what we did was looking at, okay, here's our broad direction.

Now let's look technically, what can we do?

to facilitate this broad direction.

After that, maybe I would come in or one of my lawyers would come in and say,

okay, this is what we may do.

Okay.

There are many things we can do, but we are not allowed to do them. And then

after that, there's still a final level that we look at, and that's what should

we do?

Because there are many things that would be technically possible and technically

legal, but a bad idea.

For Natan, It was a CIA -led operation, so we had to have agency sign off.

Really? Someone from the agency stood behind the operator and the analyst

and gave the order to launch every attack.

Before they even started this attack, they put inside of the code the kill

a date at which it would stop operating.

Cut -off date. We don't normally see that in other threats.

And you have to think, well, why is there a cut -off date in there?

And when you realize that, well, succinct was probably written by

that there are laws regarding how you can use this sort of software, that

may have been a legal team who said, no, you need to have a cut -off date in

there and you can only do this and you can only go that far and we need to

if this is legal or not.

That date is a few days before Obama's inauguration.

So the theory was that this was an operation that needed to be stopped at a

certain time because there was going to be a handover and that more approval was

needed.

Are you prepared to take the oath, Senator?

I am.

I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear.

I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear.

The Olympic Games was reauthorized by President Obama in his first year in

office, 2009.

It was fascinating because it was the first year of the Obama administration

they would talk to you endlessly about cyber defense.

We count on computer networks to deliver our oil and gas, our power and our

water. We rely on them for public transportation and air traffic control.

But just as we failed in the past to invest in our physical infrastructure,

roads, our bridges and rails, we failed to invest in the security of our digital

infrastructure.

He was running East Room events, trying to get people to focus on the need to

defend cyber networks and defend American infrastructure.

But when you asked questions about the use of offensive cyber weapons,

everything went dead. No cooperation.

White House wouldn't help. Pentagon wouldn't help. NSA wouldn't help. Nobody

would talk to you about it.

But when you dug into the budget, for cyber spending during the Obama

administration, what you discovered was much of it was being spent on offensive

cyber weapons.

You see phrases like Title X CNO.

Title X means operations for the U .S. military, and CNO means computer network

operations.

This is considerable evidence that Stuxnet was just the opening wedge.

of what is a much broader U .S. government effort now to develop an

class of weapons.

Sexnet wasn't just an evolution.

It was really a revolution in the threat landscape.

In the past, the vast majority of threats that we saw were always

an operator somewhere.

They wouldn't infect your machine, but they would have what's called a callback

or command and control channel.

The threats would actually contact the operator and say, what do you want me to

do next?

And the operator would send down commands and say, maybe search through

directory, find these folders, find these files, upload these files to me,

spread to this other machine, things of that nature.

But Stuxnet couldn't have a command and control channel because once it got

inside in its hands, it would not have been able to reach back out.

to the attackers.

The Natanz network is completely air -gapped from the rest of the internet.

not connected to the internet. It's its own isolated network.

Generally, getting across an air -gap is one of the more difficult challenges

that attackers will face just because of the fact that everything is in place to

prevent that.

Everything, you know, the policies and procedures and the physical network

that's in place is specifically designed to prevent you crossing the air -gap.

But there's no truly air -gap network in these real -world production

environments. People got to get new code into Natan.

People have to get log files off of the networks in Natan. People have to

upgrade equipment.

People have to upgrade computers.

This highlights one of the major security issues that we have in the

If you think, well, nobody can attack this power plant or this chemical plant

because it's not connected to the Internet, that's a bizarre illusion.

The first time we introduced the code into Natan, we used human assets.

Maybe CIA, more likely than thought. But our team was kept in the dark about the

tradecraft.

We heard rumors in Moscow, an Iranian laptop infected by a phony semen

technician with a flash drive.

A double agent in Iran with access to Natan.

But I don't really know.

What we had to focus on was to write the code so that once inside, the worm

acted on its own.

They built in all the code and all the logic into the threat to be able to

operate all by itself.

It had the ability to spread by itself.

It had the ability to figure out, do I have the right PLCs?

Have I arrived in a TAM? Am I at the target?

And when it's on target, it executes autonomously.

That also means you cannot call off the attack.

It was definitely the type of attack where someone had decided that this is

they wanted to do.

There was no turning back once Sexcent was released.

When it began to actually execute its payload, you would have a whole bunch of

centrifuges in a huge array of cascades, sitting in a big hall.

And then just off that hall, you would have an operator's room.

big control panels in front of them, a big window where they could see into the

hall.

Computers monitor the activities of all these centrifuges.

So a centrifuge is driven by an electrical motor.

And the speed of this electrical motor is controlled by another PLC, by another

programmable logic controller.

SexNet would wait for 13 days before doing anything.

Because 13 days is about the time it takes to actually fill an entire cascade

centrifuges with uranium.

They didn't want to attack when the centrifuges essentially were empty or at

beginning of the enrichment process.

What SexNet did was it actually would sit there during the 13 days and

record all of the normal activities that were happening and save it.

And once they saw them spinning for 13 days, then the attack occurred.

Centrifuges spin at incredible speeds, about 1 ,000 hertz. They have a safe

operating speed, 63 ,000 revolutions per minute.

That's what caused the uranium enrichment centrifuges to spin up to 1

hertz. Up to 80 ,000 revolutions per minute.

What would happen was those centrifuges would go through what's called a

resonance frequency.

It would go through a frequency at which the metal would basically vibrate

uncontrollably and essentially shatter.

There'd be uranium gas everywhere.

And then the second attack they attempted was they actually tried to

2 hertz. They were slowed down to almost 10 still.

And at 2 hertz, sort of an opposite effect occurred.

You can imagine it to a top that you spin, and as the top begins to slow

it begins to wobble. That's what happens to these centrifuges.

They would begin to wobble and essentially shatter and fall apart.

And instead of sending back to the computer what was really happening, it

send back that old data that it had recorded.

And so the computer's sitting there thinking, yep, running at 1 ,000 hertz,

everything's fine. Running at 1 ,000 hertz, everything's fine.

But those centrifuges are potentially spinning up wildly.

A huge noise would occur.

It'd be like, you know, a jet engine.

So the operators then would know, whoa, something is going wrong here. They

might look at their monitors and see, it says 1 ,000 hertz, but they would hear

that in the room something gravely bad was happening.

Not only are the operators fooled into thinking everything's normal, but also

any kind of automated protective logic is fooled.

You can't just turn these centrifuges off.

They have to be brought down in a very controlled manner.

And so they would hit literally the big red button.

to initiate a graceful shutdown.

And that intercepts that code.

So you would have these operators slamming on that button over and over

and nothing would happen.

If your cyber weapon is good enough, if your enemy is not aware of it,

it is an ideal weapon, because the enemy even don't understand what is happening

to it.

Maybe even better, the enemy begins to doubt their own capability.

Absolutely.

Certainly.

One must conclude that what happened at Natanz must have driven the engineers

crazy. Because the worst thing that can happen to a maintenance engineer is not

being able to figure out what the cause of specific trouble is. So they must

have been analyzing themselves to death.

You know, you see centrifuges blowing up.

You look at the computer screens.

They go with the proper speed.

There's a proper gas pressure. Everything looks beautiful.

Through 2009, it was going pretty smoothly.

Centrifuges were blowing up. The International Atomic Energy Agency

would go into Natanz and they would see that whole sections of the centrifuges

had been removed.

The United States knew from its intelligence channels that some Iranian

scientists and engineers were being fired because...

The centrifuges were blowing up, and the Iranians had assumed that this was

because they were making errors, they were manufacturing mistakes. Clearly

was somebody's fault.

So the program was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing, which was it

was blowing up centrifuges and it was leaving no trace and leaving the

to wonder what they got hit by. This was the brilliance of Olympic Games.

You know, as the former director of a couple of big three -letter agencies,

slowing down 1 ,000 centrifuges in a ton, an unalloyed good.

There was a need for buying time. There was a need for slowing them down.

There was a need to try to push them to the negotiating table.

I mean, there are a lot of variables at play here.

President Obama would go down into the Situation Room.

And he would have laid out in front of him what they called the horse blanket,

which was a giant schematic of the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant.

And the designers of Olympic Games would describe to him what kind of progress

they made and look for him for the authorization to move on ahead to the

attack.

And at one point during those discussions, he said to a number of his

know, I had some concerns because once word of this gets out, and eventually he

knew it would get out, the Chinese may use it as an excuse for their attacks on

us or Russians might or others.

So he clearly had some misgivings, but they weren't big enough to stop him from

going ahead with the program.

And then in 2010, a decision was made.

to change the code.

Our human assets weren't always able to get code updates into Natanz.

And we weren't told exactly why.

But we were told we had to have a cyber solution for delivering the code.

But the delivery systems were tricky.

If they weren't aggressive enough, they wouldn't get in. They were too

aggressive. they could spread and be discovered.

When we got the first sample, there was some configuration information inside of

it, and one of the pieces in there was a version number, 1 .1.

And that made us realize, well, look, this likely isn't the only copy.

We went back through our databases looking for anything that looked similar

Stuxnet.

As we began to collect more samples, we found a few earlier versions of Stuxnet.

And when we analyzed that code, we saw that versions previous to 1 .1 were a

less aggressive.

The earlier version of Sexton, it basically required humans to do a little

of double -clicking in order for it to spread from one computer to another.

And so what we believe after looking at that code is two things.

One, either they didn't get into Natanz with that earlier version because it

simply wasn't aggressive enough, wasn't able to jump over that error gap.

And or two, that payload as well...

Didn't work properly.

Didn't work to their satisfaction.

Maybe was not explosive enough.

There were slightly different versions, which were aimed at different parts of

the centrifuge cascade.

But the guys at Symantec figured you changed the code because the first

variations couldn't get in and didn't work right.

Bullshit.

We always found a way to get across the air gap.

At TAO, we laughed when people thought they were protected by an air gap.

And for OG, the early versions of the payload did work.

But what NSA did was always low -key and subtle.

The problem was that Unit 8200, the Israeli, kept pushing up to be more

aggressive.

The later version of DuckNet, 1 .1.

That version had multiple ways of spreading. It had the four zero days

it, for example, that allowed it to spread all by itself without you doing

anything. It could spread via network shares.

It could spread via USB keys.

It was able to spread via network exploits. That's the sample that

the stolen digital certificate.

That is the sample that all of a sudden became so noisy and caught the attention

of the antivirus guys.

In the first sample, we don't find that.

This is very strange because it tells us that in the process of this

development, the attackers were less concerned with operational security.

Pac -Man actually kept a log inside of itself of all the machines that it

infected along the way as it jumped from one machine to another to another to

another. And we were able to gather up.

All the samples that we could acquire, tens of thousands of samples. We

extracted all of those logs. We can see the exact path that took.

Eventually, we were able to trace back this version of Stuxnet to ground zero,

to the first five infections in the world.

The first five infections are all outside an intense plant, all inside of

organizations inside of Iran, all organizations that are involved in

control systems.

The construction of industrial control facilities, clearly contractors who were

working on the Natanz facility, and the attackers knew that.

They're electrical companies, they're piping companies, they're, you know,

sorts of companies, and they knew that technicians from those companies would

visit Natanz. So they would infect these companies, and then technicians would

take... Their computer or their laptop or their USB, that operator then goes

down into Natanz. And he plugs in his USB key, which has some code that he

to update into Natanz, into the Natanz network.

And now Sucset is able to get inside Natanz and conduct its attack.

These five companies were specifically targeted to spread Sucset into Natanz.

And that it wasn't that...

So it kind of escaped out in the town and then spread all over the world. And

was this big mistake and, oh, it wasn't meant to spread that far, but it really

did. No, that's not the way we see it. The way we see it is that they wanted it

to spread far so that they could get it into the town.

Someone decided that we're going to create something new, something evolved,

that's going to be far, far, far more aggressive.

And we're okay, frankly, with it spreading all over the world.

to innocent machines and in order to go after our target.

The Mossad had the role, had the assignment to

deliver the virus, to make sure that Stuxnet would be put

in place in a time to affect the centrifuges.

Mayor Dagan, the head of Mossad, was under growing pressure from the prime

minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to produce results.

Inside Iraq, we were furious.

The Israelis took our code for delivery system and changed it.

Then, on their own, without our agreement, they just fucking launched

2010, around the same time they started killing Iranian scientists.

And they fucked up the code.

Instead of hiding, the code started shutting down computers, so naturally

noticed.

Because they were in a hurry, they opened Pandora's box.

They let it out, and it spread all over the world.

The worm spread quickly.

But somehow it remained unseen until it was identified in Belarus.

Soon after, Israeli intelligence confirmed that it had made its way into

hands of the Russian Federal Security Service, a successor to the KGB.

So it happened that the formula for a secret cyber weapon designed by the U

and Israel fell into the hands of Russia and the very country it was meant to

attack.

When some country or a coalition of countries targets a nuclear facility,

it's an act of war.

Please, let's be frank here.

If it wasn't Iran, if a nuclear facility in the United States

was targeted in the same way, the American government

would not sit by and let this go.

Shuxnet is an attack in peacetime on critical infrastructure.

Yes, it is.

Look, when I read about it, I thought, whoa.

That's a big deal.

Yeah.

The people who were running this program, including Leon Panetta, the

of the CIA at the time, had to go down into the Situation Room and face

President Obama, Vice President Biden, and explain that this program was

suddenly on the loose.

Vice President Biden, at one point during this discussion...

sort of exploded in Biden -esque fashion and blamed the Israelis.

He said, it must have been the Israelis who made a change in the code that

enabled it to get out.

President Obama said to the senior leadership, you told me it wouldn't get

of the network. It did. You told me the Iranians would never figure out it was

the United States.

They did. You told me it would have a huge effect on their nuclear program,

it didn't.

The Natanz plant is inspected every couple of weeks by the International

Energy Agency inspectors.

And if you line up what you know about the attacks with the inspection reports,

you can see the effects.

If you go to the IAEA reports, we really saw that a lot of centrifuges were

switched off and they were removed.

As much as almost a couple of thousand got compromised.

When you put it all together, I wouldn't be surprised if the program got delayed

by the one year.

But go then to year 2012 -13 and look, you know, how the centrifuges started to

come up again.

Iran's number of centrifuges went up exponentially to 20 ,000 with a

of low -enriched uranium.

These are high numbers.

Iran's nuclear facility has expanded.

with the construction of Fordow and other highly protected facilities.

So ironically, cyber warfare, assassination of its nuclear scientists,

economic sanctions, political isolation.

Iran has gone through A to X of every coercive policy that the US,

Israel and those who ally with them.

have placed on Iran.

And they have actually made Iran's nuclear program more advanced today than

was ever before.

This is a very, very dangerous minefield that we are walking. And the nations

who decide to take these covert actions should be taking into consideration

all the effects.

including the moral effect.

I would say that this is the price that we have to pay in this

war, and our blade of righteousness should be so sharp.

In Israel and in the United States, the blade of righteousness cut both ways,

wounding the targets and the attackers.

When Stuxnet infected American computers, the Department of Homeland

unaware of the cyber weapons launched by the NSA, devoted enormous resources

trying to protect Americans from their own government.

We had met the enemy, and it was us.

The purpose of the watch stations that you see in front of you is to aggregate

the data coming in from multiple feeds of what the cyber threats could be. So

we see threats, we can provide real -time recommendations for both private

companies as well as federal agencies.

Can you give us a readout on this DuckNet virus?

Absolutely. We'd be more than happy to discuss that.

Early July of 2010, we received a call that said that this piece of malware was

discovered, and could we take a look at it?

When we first started the analysis, there was that, oh, crap moment, you

where we sat there and said, this is something that's significant. It's

impacting industrial control.

It can disrupt it to the point where it could cause harm and not only damage to

the equipment, but potentially harm or loss of life.

We were very concerned because Stuxnet was something that we had not seen

before. So there wasn't a lot of sleep that night.

Basically, light up the phones, call everybody we know, inform the Secretary,

inform the White House, inform the other departments and agencies, wake up the

world, and figure out what's going on with this particular malware.

Good morning, Chairman Lieberman, Ranking Member Collins.

Something as simple and innocuous as this becomes a challenge for all of us

maintain accountability and control of our critical infrastructure systems.

This actually contains the Stuxnet virus.

I've been asked on a number of occasions, did you ever think this was

And at no point did that ever really cross our mind because we were looking

it from the standpoint of, is this something that's coming after the

You know, what's going to potentially impact, you know, our industrial control

base here in the United States?

You know, I liken it to, you know, field battle.

You don't think the sniper that's behind you is going to be shooting at you

because you expect him to be on your side.

We really don't know who the attacker was in the Stuxnet case.

So help us understand a little more what this thing is, whose origin

and destination we don't understand.

Did anybody ever give you any indication that it was something that they already

knew about? No. At no time did I get the impression from someone that that's

okay, you know, get the little pat on the head and scoot it out the door.

I never received a stand -down order.

No one ever asked to stop looking at this.

Do we think that this was a nation -state actor and that there are a

number of nation -states that have such advanced capacity?

Sean McGurk, the director of cyber for the Department of Homeland Security,

testified before the Senate about how he thought Suxnet was a terrifying threat

to the United States.

Is that not a problem?

And how do you mean?

That the Suxnet thing was a bad idea?

No, no, no, just that before he knew what it was and what it attached to. Oh,

get it. Yeah, that he was responding to something that... He thought it was a

threat to critical infrastructure in the United States. Yeah.

The worm is loose.

The worm is loose. I understand.

But there's a further theory having to do with whether or not, following upon

David Sanger. I got the subplot. And who did that? Was it the Israelis? Yeah. I

truly don't know.

And even though I don't know, I still can't talk about it. All right?

Sucks not with somebody's covert action.

All right? And the definition of covert action is an activity in which you want

to have the hand of the actor forever hidden.

So by definition, it's going to end up in this, we don't talk about these

box.

To this day, the United States government has never acknowledged

offensive cyber attack anywhere in the world.

But thanks to Mr. Snowden, we know that in 2012, President Obama issued an

executive order.

that laid out some of the conditions under which cyber weapons can be used.

interestingly, every use of a cyber weapon requires presidential sign -off.

That is only true in the physical world for nuclear weapons.

Nuclear war and nuclear weapons are vastly different from cyber war and

weapons. Having said that, there are some similarities.

And in the early 1960s, the United States government suddenly realized it

thousands of nuclear weapons, big ones and little ones, weapons on Jeeps,

weapons on submarines.

And it really didn't have a doctrine. It really didn't have a strategy.

It really didn't have an understanding at the policy level about how it was

going to use all of these things.

And so academics started publishing unclassified documents about nuclear war

and nuclear weapons.

And the result was more than 20 years in the United States of very vigorous

national debates about how we want to go use nuclear weapons.

And not only did that cause the Congress and people in the executive branch in

Washington to think about these things, it caused the Russians to think about

these things.

And out of that grew nuclear doctrine, mutual assured destruction, all of that

complicated set of nuclear dynamics.

Today, on this vital issue, at least, we have seen what can be accomplished when

we pull together.

We can't have that discussion in a sensible way right now about cyber war

cyber weapons because everything is secret.

And when you get into a discussion with people in the government, people still

in the government, people who have security clearances, you run into a

wall. Trying to stop Iran is really my number one job.

Can I ask you in that context about the Stuxnet computer virus potentially? You

can ask, but I won't comment.

Can you tell us anything?

No. What do you think has had the most impact on their nuclear decision

The Stuxnet virus?

I can't talk about Stuxnet. I can't even talk about the operation of Iran

centrifuges. Was the U .S. involved in any way in the development of Stuxnet?

It's hard to get into any kind of comment on that until we've finished our

examination.

But, sir, I'm not asking you if you think another country was involved. I'm

asking you if the U .S. was involved.

And this is not something that we're going to be able to answer at this

Look, for the longest time, I was in fear that I couldn't actually say the

phrase computer network attack.

This stuff is hideously overclassified, and it gets into the way of a mature

public discussion as to what it is we as a democracy want our nation to be doing

up here in the cyber domain.

This is the former director of NSA and CIA saying this stuff is overclassified.

One of the reasons it's as highly classified as it is, this is a peculiar

system. This is a weapon system that's come out of the espionage community.

And so those people have a habit of secrecy.

Secrecy is still justifiable in certain cases to protect sources or to protect

national security.

But when we deal with secrecy, don't hide behind it to use it as an excuse to

not disclose something properly that you...

know should be, or that the American people need ultimately to see.

While most government officials refused to acknowledge the operation, at least

one key insider did leak parts of the story to the press.

In 2012, David Sanger wrote a detailed account of Olympic Games that unmasked

the extensive joint operation between the U .S. and Israel to launch cyber

attacks on Matanz.

The publication of this story Coming at a time that turned out that there were a

number of other unrelated national security stories being published led to

announcement of investigations by the Attorney General.

Into the press and into the leaf. Into the press and into the leaf.

Soon after the article, the Obama administration targeted General James

Cartwright in a criminal investigation for allegedly leaking classified details

about Stuxnet.

There are reports of cyber attacks on the Iranian nuclear programs that you've

ordered. What's your reaction to this information getting out? Well, first of

all, I'm not going to comment on the details of what are

supposed to be classified items.

Since I've been in office, my attitude has been zero tolerance for these kinds

of leaks.

We have mechanisms in place where if we can root out folks.

who have leaked, they will suffer consequences.

It became a significant issue and a very wide -ranging investigation in which I

think most of the people who were cleared for Olympic Games at some point

been, you know, interviewed and so forth.

When Stuxnet hit the media, they polygraphed everyone in our office,

people who didn't know shit. You know, they poly the interns, for God's sake.

These are criminal acts when they release information like this.

and we will conduct thorough investigations as we have in the past.

The administration never filed charges, possibly afraid that a prosecution would

reveal classified details about Stuxnet.

To this day, no one in the U .S. or Israeli governments has officially

acknowledged the existence of the joint operation.

I would never compromise ongoing operations in the field,

We should be able to talk about capability.

We can talk about our bunker busters.

Why not our cyber weapons?

The secrecy of the operation has been blown.

Our friends in Israel took a weapon that we jointly developed, in part to keep

Israel from doing something crazy, and then used it on their own in a way that

blew the cover of the operation and could have led to war. And we can't talk

about that?

There's a way to talk about Stuxnet.

It happened. The deny that it happened is foolish. So the fact that it happened

is really what we're talking about here. What are the implications of the fact

that we now are in a post -Stuxnet world?

What I said to David Sanger was I understand the difference in destruction

dramatic, but this has the whiff of August 1945.

Somebody just used a new weapon, and this weapon will not be put back into

box. I know no operational details and don't know what anyone did or didn't do

before someone decided to use the weapon. I do know this. If we go out and

something, most of the rest of the world now thinks that's a new standard and

it's something that they now feel legitimated to do as well.

But the rules of engagement, international norms, treaty standards,

exist right now.

The law of war, because it began to develop so long ago, is really dependent

thinking of things kinetically, in the physical realm.

So, for example, we think in terms of attacks.

You know an attack when it happens in the kinetic world. It's not really much

a mystery. But in cyberspace, it is sort of confusing to think, how far do we

have to go before something is considered an attack?

So we have to take all the vocabulary.

and the terms that we use in strategy and military operations and adapt them

into the cyber realm.

For nuclear, we have these extensive inspection regimes.

The Russians come and look at our silos.

We go and look at their silos.

Bad as things get between the two countries, those inspection regimes have

up. But working that out for cyber would be virtually impossible.

Where do you send your inspector?

Inside the laptop of, you know, how many laptops are there in the United States

and Russia?

It's much more difficult in the cyber area to construct an international

based on treaty commitments and rules of the road and so forth.

Although we've tried to have discussions with the Chinese and Russians and so

forth about that, but it's very difficult.

Right now, the norm in cyberspace is do whatever you can get away with.

That's not a good norm, but it's the norm that we have.

That's the norm that's preferred by states that are engaging in lots of

different kinds of activities that they feel are benefiting their national

security.

Those who excel in cyber are trying to slow down the process of creating

regulation.

Those who are victims will like the regulation to be in the open as

soon as possible.

International law in this area is written by custom, and customary law

a nation to say, this is what we did and this is why we did it.

And the U .S. doesn't want to push the law in that direction, and so it chooses

not to disclose its involvement.

And one of the reasons that I thought it was important to tell the story of

Olympic Games was not simply because it's a cool spy story. It is, but it's

because as a nation...

We need to have a debate about how we want to use cyber weapons because we are

the most vulnerable nation on earth to cyber attack ourselves.

If you get up in the morning and turn off your alarm and make coffee and pump

gas and use the ATM, you've touched industrial control systems. It's what

our lives. And unfortunately, these systems are connected and interconnected

some ways that make them vulnerable.

Critical infrastructure systems generally were built years and years and

ago without security in mind, that they didn't realize how things were going to

change. Maybe they weren't even meant to be connected to the Internet. And we've

seen through a lot of experimentation and through also, unfortunately, a lot

attacks, that most of these systems are relatively easy for a sophisticated

hacker to get into.

Let's say you took over the control system of a railway.

You could switch tracks.

you could cause derailment of trains carrying explosive materials.

What if you were in the control system of gas pipelines, and when a valve was

supposed to be open, it was closed from the pressure built up that the pipeline

exploded?

There are companies that run electric power generation or electric power

distribution that we know have been hacked by foreign entities.

To have the ability...

to shut down the power grid.

Imagine for a moment that not only all the power went off on the East Coast,

the entire Internet came down.

Imagine what the economic impact of that is, even if it only lasted for 24

hours.

According to the officials, Iran is the first country ever in the Middle East to

actually be engaged in a cyber war with the United States and Israel. If

anything, they said the recent cyber attacks were what encouraged them to

to set up the cyber army, which will gather computer scientists,

programmers, software engineers. If you are youth and you see assassination or

nuclear scientists, your nuclear facilities are getting attacked.

Wouldn't you join your national cyber army?

Well, many did. And that's why today Iran has one of the largest cyber

armies in the world.

So whoever initiated this and was very proud of themselves to see that little

dip in Iran's centrifuge numbers should look back now and acknowledge

that it was a major mistake.

Very quickly.

Iran sent a message to the United States, very sophisticated message, and

did that with two attacks.

First, they attacked Saudi Aramco, the biggest oil company in the world, and

wiped out every piece of software, every line of code on 30 ,000 computer

devices.

Then... Iran did a surge attack on the American banks.

The most extensive attack on American banks ever, launched from the Middle

happening right now.

Millions of customers trying to bank online this week blocked.

Among the targets, Bank of America, PNC, and Wells Fargo. The U .S. suspects

hackers in Iran may be involved.

When Iran hit our banks, we could have shut down their botnet.

But the State Department got nervous because the servers weren't actually in

Iran. So until there was a diplomatic solution, Obama let the private sector

deal with the problem.

I imagine that in the White House Situation Room, people sat around and

let me be clear, I don't imagine, I know, people sat around in the White

Situation Room and said, the Iranians have sent us a message which is

essentially, stop.

attacking us in cyberspace the way you did at Natanz with Stuxnet.

We can do it too.

There are unintended consequences of the Stuxnet attack.

You wanted to cause confusion and damage to the other side, but then the other

side can do the same to you.

The monster turned against its creator, and now everyone is in this game.

They did a good job in showing the world, including the bad guys, what you

need to do in order to cause serious trouble that could lead to injuries and

deaths. It's inevitable that more countries will acquire the capacity to

cyber both for espionage and for destructive activities.

And we've seen this in some of the recent conflicts that Russia's been

in. If there's a war, then somebody will try to knock out our communications

system or the radar.

State -sponsored cyber sleeper cells, they're out there everywhere today. It

could be for communications purposes. It could be for data exfiltration.

It could be to, you know, shepherd in the next Stuxnet.

I mean, you've been focusing on Stuxnet, but that was just a small part of a

much larger Iranian mission.

It was a larger Iranian mission?

Nitro Zeus.

NZ.

We spent hundreds of millions, maybe billions on it.

In the event the Israelis did attack Iran, we assumed we would be drawn into

conflict.

We built in attacks on Iran's command and control systems so the Iranians

couldn't talk to each other in a fight.

We infiltrated their IADs, military air defense systems, so they couldn't shoot

down our planes if we flew over.

We also went after their civilian support systems, power grids,

communications, financial systems.

We were inside, waiting, watching, ready to disrupt, degrade, and destroy those

systems with cyber attacks.

In comparison,

That was a back alley operation.

NZ was the plan for a full -scale cyber war with no attribution.

The question is, is that the kind of world we want to live in?

And if we don't, as citizens, how do we go about a process where we have a more

sane discussion?

We need an entirely new way of thinking about how we're going to solve this

problem.

You're not going to get an entirely new way of solving this problem.

until you begin to have an open acknowledgement that we have cyber

well and that we may have to agree to some limits on their use if we're going

get other nations to limit their use. It's not going to be a one -way street.

I'm old enough to have worked on nuclear arms control and biological weapons

arms control and chemical weapons arms control.

And I was told in each of those types of arms control, when we were beginning,

It's too hard. There are all these problems.

It's technical. There's engineering.

There's science involved.

There are real verification difficulties.

You'll never get there.

Well, it took 20, 30 years in some cases.

But we have a biological weapons treaty that's pretty damn good. We have a

chemical weapons treaty that's pretty damn good. We've got three or four

weapons treaties.

Yes, it may be hard, and it may take 20 or 30 years.

But it'll never happen unless you get serious about it. And it'll never happen

unless you start it.

Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our

international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has

not. A comprehensive, long -term deal with Iran that will prevent it from

obtaining a nuclear weapon.

It was reached in Lausanne, Switzerland, by Iran, the U .S., Britain, France,

Germany, Russia, and China. It is a deal in which Iran will cut its installed

centrifuges by more than two -thirds. Iran will not enrich uranium with its

advanced centrifuges for at least the next ten years.

It will make our country, our allies, and our world safer.

Seventy years after the murder of six million Jews.

Iran's rulers promised to destroy my country, and the response from nearly

every one of the governments represented here has been utter silence,

deafening silence.

Perhaps you can all understand.

why Israel is not joining you in celebrating this deal.

History shows that America must lead not just with our might, but with our

principles.

It shows we are stronger not when we are alone, but when we bring the world

together.

Today's announcement marks one more chapter in the pursuit of a safer and

helpful, more hopeful world.

Thank you.

God bless you.

And God bless the United States of America.

The science fiction cyber war scenario is here. That's Nitro Zeus.

But my concern, the reason I'm talking, is because when you shut down a

country's power grid, it doesn't just pop back up.

It's more like Humpty Dumpty.

And if all the king's men can't turn the lights back on or filter the water for

weeks, then lots of people die.

and something we can do to others, they can do to us too.

Is that something that we should keep quiet?

Or should we talk about it?

I've gone to many people on this film, even friends of mine, who won't talk to

me about the NSA or Sucks, not even off the record, for fear of going to jail.

Is that fear protecting us?

No, but it protects me.

Or should I say, we.

I'm an actor playing a role written from the testimony of a small number of

people from NSA and CIA, all of whom are angry about the secrecy, but too scared

to come forward. Now we're forward.

Well, forward leaning.