[ISN] Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html

By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
June 1, 2012

WASHINGTON -- From his first months in office, President Obama secretly 
ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that 
run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding 
America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants 
in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks -- begun in the Bush 
administration and code-named Olympic Games -- even after an element of 
the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of 
a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and 
sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who 
began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States 
and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the 
worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the 
director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. 
Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the 
progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members 
of the president’s national security team who were in the room.

[...]


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