[exelius]

Also to clarify, Stuxnet was the trojan (widely attributed to the CIA and Mossad) designed to introduce subtle errors into the uranium centrifuges that Iran was using to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons development.

It was really ingenious in a lot of ways: it targeted a specific industrial controller card. Even then, all it did was use the controller card to introduce a subtle voltage fluctuation in the power supply in 1/10 of the centrifuges that rapidly burned out the motors.

Basically, it introduced subtle errors into the system that the Iranians spent about a year trying to resolve. It also spread itself through some ingenious mechanisms to avoid air gaps -- in this case it is suspected they infiltrated a supplier for the centrifuges in China via spear phishing and got it on a USB drive from the supplier to cross the air gap (the way it embeds and hides itself in USB microcode is pretty cool).

The whole story reads like a spy novel; except it actually happened. It's one of my favorite examples of how a nation-state can use cyberterrorism to sabotage an enemy from the shadows -- and this action saved lives, because the alternative was an Israeli air strike on the compound. IMO this is a great example of ethical super-spy hacking.