Operation Olympic Games

Also known as: GOSSIPGIRL

The events have been described in detail in the 2015 book Countdown to Zero Day and the 2016 documentary Zero Days. The piece of crucial information that was missing from both sources, how the malware was actually brought inside the facility, was documented in an investigative report in 2019. (The New York Times) 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.

🌍 Country ["USA", "Israel"]

Associated Operations

Olympic Games / Stuxnet

Introduction

The events have been described in detail in the 2015 book Countdown to Zero Day and the 2016 documentary Zero Days. The piece of crucial information that was missing from both sources, how the malware was actually brought inside the facility, was documented in an investigative report in 2019. (The New York Times) 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.

Activities and Tactics

Country of Origin: 🇮🇱 [“USA”, “Israel”]

Notable Campaigns

  • Olympic Games / Stuxnet

Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs)

Information pending cataloguing.

Notable Indicators of Compromise (IOCs)

No curated IOCs are currently published for this actor. This section will be updated when stable, attributable indicators are available.

Malware and Tools

  • Stuxnet
  • Flame:
  • Stuxnet:
  • Miniflame:
  • Duqu:
  • Gauss:

Attribution and Evidence

Country of Origin: [“USA”, “Israel”] Additional attribution information pending cataloguing.

References

References pending cataloguing.