Prologue
T
HE
WORM
WAS
LOOSE
.That was the mystifying, disturbing news rippling throughFort Meade, the headquarters of the National Security Agency,and across the Potomac at the CIA. Now, on a midsummer day in2010, Leon Panetta, the CIA director, and two men responsible foroverseeing the most sophisticated, complex cyberattack the UnitedStates had ever launched against an adversary descended the stepsinto the White House Situation Room to tell President Obama andhis national security team that something had gone badly awry. America’s most closely guarded covert operation targeting Iran’snuclear program—known to a small circle of officials by its codename, “Olympic Games”—was in jeopardy because of a careless er-ror. Suddenly the malicious software Americans and Israelis spentyears perfecting was being replicated across the Internet, and hack-ers had given it an ominous-sounding name: “Stuxnet.” The menknew they would face blistering questions in the Situation Room:Obama and his team would demand to know whether the mistakewas fatal to their carefully designed plan to undermine Iran’s abil-ity to produce nuclear fuel. The “worm” in question was a cyberworm, the product of years of cooperation between a small teamof computer warriors at Fort Meade and their counterparts, half a world away, inside a military intelligence agency that Israel barely acknowledges exists.For three years, Olympic Games had unfolded almost flaw-lessly. The Americans spent months devising the worm to strikedirectly at the tall, silvery centrifuges the Iranians were using to
Search History:
Result 00 of 00
00 results for result for
p.
Confront and Conceal by David E. Sanger - Excerpt
FROM INSIDE OBAMA’S SITUATION ROOM . . . THE CRITICAL MOMENTS IN THE COVERT WAR AGAINST IRAN, THE STRUGGLES TO DEAL WITH A RECALCITRANT PAKISTAN AND ITS FAST-GROWING NUCLEAR ARSENAL, THE TENSIONS WITH THE AMERICAN MILITARY…
(More)
32.7K
Reads
48
Readcasts
101
Embed Views
Recommended
More From This User
Notes
Load more
