“This was obviously the first, biggest, and most sophisticated example of a state or two states using a cyber weapon for offensive purposes,” says New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger in Zero Days. He’s talking about Stuxnet—an elegant, dense, and massive piece of malware. First discovered via an “epidemic of computer shutdowns” in 2010, eventually it was recognized as something far greater: a powerful, covert American and Israeli cyber attack on an Iranian nuclear facility.
Alex Gibney’s documentary Zero Days delves into how Stuxnet happened—a tale that’s part 007-style spy caper, part computer nerds waxing rhapsodic about code—and what it means that the Obama administration refuses to acknowledge its role in the attack. The Bush and Obama administrations have been deeply committed to offensive cyber actions, Zero Days argues—to secretly developing and deploying, as Sanger says, “an entire new class of weapons.”
