The Setting

So Where did it all Go Down?

Saber, Hamed. "Anti-Aircraft Guns Guarding Natanz Nuclear Facility, Iran" 6/22/2006 via wikipedia. Attribution 2.0 Generic

 Cyber war is different than other types of warfare. You can be sitting in your office or out on the plant floor. All you hear is the sound of keyboards clicking and the equipment around you buzzing. No gun shots. No war planes flying overhead. You go about your daily lives without having to worry about inhaling the bitter smells of explosions going off. Little did you know, you were still under attack. You were being attacked by a world that you could not see or feel.

This was exactly the scenario going on when the Nanatz Fuel Enrichment Plant  in Nanatz, Iran. Many, if not all, of the workers and scientist there were clueless to the fact that they were being attacked from cyber space. The only thing concerning them was that their product was going bad at an alarming rate. This product was uranium.

Nanatz, Iran was one of the main locations for the Stuxnet controversy. Stuxnet was mostly concentrated around that area because its primary target was there. The location of this facility was probably a reason why a cyber weapon was used instead of a conventional weapon (we must also remember that a conventional attack would bring all sorts of backlash). This location was heavily guarded as you can see from the image above. It is also underground.

There was other locations that were involved in this controversy such as the United States, Israel, and Germany, but they were not the centers of attention. For the United States, we had D.C. where the order to launch this attack was allegedly given. Israel was involved due to their fears of getting hit by a nuclear bomb from Iran and asking for U.S. assault. Finally, Germany had a role in this story because that is where a great deal of analysis on Stuxnet occurs.

AND of course there is cyber space. The world in which this weapon was unleashed from. However, is that really a location? Just something to think about that is more important than you might think.