The U.S. and Israel created the Stuxnet virus

Citing a long report in the New York Times, and article at ars technica explains how the malware was targeted at Iran, but now has escaped into the world, with massive blowback.

The article is adapted from journalist David Sanger's forthcoming book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, and it confirms that both the US and Israeli governments developed and deployed Stuxnet. The goal of the worm was to break Iranian nuclear centrifuge equipment...

The code was only supposed to work within Iran's Natanz refining facility, which was air-gapped from outside networks and thus difficult to penetrate. But computers and memory cards could be carried between the public Internet and the private Natanz network...

That program, first authorized by George W. Bush, worked well enough to provide a digital map of Natanz and its industrial control hardware... When Barack Obama came to office, he continued the program—called "Olympic Games"—which unpredictably disabled bits of the Natanz plant even as it told controllers that everything was normal. But in 2010, Stuxnet escaped Natanz, probably on someone's laptop; once connected to the outside Internet, it did what it was designed not to do: spread in public...

As the International Strategy for Cyberspace notes, these sorts of electronic attacks are serious business. The US in fact reserves the right to use even military force to respond to similar attacks... Yet the US had just gone on the cyber-attack, and everyone knew it. Speculation has long swirled around government-backed hackers from nations like China and Russia, especially, who have been suspected of involvement in espionage, industrial trade secret theft, and much else. Would something like Stuxnet damage US credibility when it complained about such attacks? (China has long adopted the "you do it too!" defense on Internet issues, especially when it comes to censoring and filtering of Internet content.)