Before Stuxnet

The idea of creating a computer worm capable of attacking uranium enrichment facilities could not come up out of nowhere. It all began with two isolated events, which happened in different geographical places and years apart from each other. The first event took place in India near Pakistan’s eastern border in 1974. The second event happened in the coastal city of Taranto, Italy, in 2003. Despite the fact that both events took place outside Iran, they combined to create a background for everything that later would become known as the Stuxnet computer worm and its cyber-attacks against the Iranian uranium enrichment program. For this reason alone, those events and their aftermath deserve a closer look. This brief book puts the creation of the computer worm Stuxnet in context. It follows an amazing journey of uranium enrichment centrifuges from the Soviet Union to Western Europe, then to Pakistan, and finally from Malaysia to Libya to the USA to Israel, where they were utilized to test the infamous computer worm Stuxnet. It also looks at unsuccessful attempts of sabotage, which had become the main weapon of choice for Western secret services in their secret war against Iranian nuclear program.