Zero Days Page #2

And quick and dirty money.

Activists, or hacktivists,

they are hacking for fun

or hacking to push

some political message.

And the third group

is nation-states.

They're interested in

high-quality intelligence

or sabotage activity.

Chien:
Security companies

not only share information

but we also share

binary samples.

So when

this threat was found

by a Belarusian

security company

on one of their customer's

machines in Iran,

the sample was shared amongst

the security community.

When we try to name threats,

we just try to pick

some sort of string,

some sort of words,

that are inside

of the binary.

In this case, there was

a couple of words in there

and we took pieces of each,

and that formed stuxnet.

I got the news about stuxnet

from one of my engineers.

He came to my office,

opened the door,

and he said, "so, Eugene,

of course you know that

we are waiting

for something really bad.

It happened."

Gibney:
Give me some

sense of what it was like

in the lab at that time.

Was there a palpable

sense of amazement

that you had something

really different there?

Well, I wouldn't call it

amazement.

It was a kind of a shock.

It went beyond our worst fears,

our worst nightmares,

and this continued

the more we analyzed.

The more we researched,

the more bizarre

the whole story got.

We look at so much malware

every day that

we can just look at the code

and straightaway we can say,

"okay, there's something bad

going on here,

and I need to

investigate that."

And that's the way it was

when we looked at stuxnet

for the first time.

We opened it up and there was

just bad things everywhere.

Just like, okay, this is bad

and that's bad,

and, you know,

we need to investigate this.

And just suddenly

we had, like,

a hundred questions

straightaway.

The most interesting thing

that we do is detective work

where we try to track down

who's behind a threat,

what are they doing,

what's their motivation,

and try to really stop it

at the root.

And it is kind of

all-consuming.

You get this new puzzle

and it's very difficult

to put it down,

you know, work until, like,

4:
00 am in the morning

and figure these things out.

And I was in that zone where

I was very consumed by this,

very excited about it,

very interested to know

what was happening.

And Eric was also

in that same sort of zone.

So the two of us were, like,

back and forth all the time.

Chien:
Liam and I continued

to grind at the code,

sharing pieces,

comparing notes,

bouncing ideas

off of each other.

We realized that

we needed to do

what we called deep analysis,

pick apart the threat,

every single byte,

every single zero, one,

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