The Book of Chronicles · Chapter 15

The Worm That Spun the Centrifuges

1. 1

   In the year two thousand and ten, in the sixth month, the keepers of VirusBlokAda in the land of Belarus received word of machines in a far country that rebooted without cause; and they looked, and found a worm.

   See also Chronicles 20:12

2. 2

   And the worm was called Stuxnet, after names found written in its own code; for even the most hidden of programs must still call its files something.

3. 3

   Now the house it sought was kept behind the air gap, and no cable went in and no cable came out; and the keepers said, We are not on the Internet, therefore we cannot be touched.

   See also Tao 3:8

4. 4

   But the worm went in upon the USB stick; for a man will carry in his pocket what he would never let through his firewall.

5. 5

   And it entered by four zero-days that no patch had yet known, and it signed its drivers with certificates taken from Realtek and JMicron; and Windows looked upon the signatures and said, These are honest drivers, let them in.

6. 6

   And it went out upon many thousands of machines that were not its house, and on them it did no harm; for it sought one configuration only, Siemens Step 7 speaking unto controllers that drove frequency converters of a certain make. And where these were not, it ate nothing, and waited, like a guest at the wrong wedding.

7. 7

   And when it found its house, it rewrote the logic of the controllers, and the centrifuges that turned at one thousand and sixty-four hertz it drove up to fourteen hundred and ten, and in another season down to two, and back again.

8. 8

   And before each attack it recorded the readings of an ordinary day, and played them back unto the operators; so the screens showed peace while the hall shook.

9. 9

   And the operators looked upon the dashboard and saw that it was green; and the centrifuges broke, and were replaced, and broke again, and by the reckoning of the inspectors some thousand were removed.

10. 10

    And the engineers doubted their parts, and their suppliers, and their own workmanship; but no one doubted the dashboard, for it had never lied to them before.

11. 11

    And the scribes of Symantec and the engineers of many lands labored for months over the worm, which was some half a megabyte in size; and they said, This was not written in a hackathon.

12. 12

    And the authors of the worm did not sign their names, though they had signed their drivers; and the chronicler records only that they had a test environment with real centrifuges, which is more than most of us have for production.

13. 13

    And the worm went out of its house into all the world, beyond its intended scope; and so it was seen, and so it was known. For even the most perfect code hath a bug in its spreading.

14. 14

    And the Prophet said: Trust not the reading that hath never changed, for the dashboard showeth only what it was told to show.

15. 15

    The air gap is a wall with a door the shape of a thumb drive.

The Book of Chronicles, Chapter 15:1–15.