In the history of state-sponsored hacking, the spectrum of cyber operations bent on sabotage have ranged from crude “wiper” attacks that destroy data on target computers to the legendary Stuxnet, a piece of malware the US and Israel first deployed in Iran in 2007 to silently accelerate the spinning of nuclear enrichment centrifuges until they destroyed themselves. Now researchers have discovered another chapter in that decades-long evolution of cybersabotage techniques: a 21-year-old specimen of malware capable of tampering with research and engineering software to undetectably sow mayhem—one that may have been used in Iran, even before Stuxnet. Vitaly Kamluk and Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade, two researchers from the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, on Thursday revealed a breakthrough in the mystery of a piece of malware known as Fast16, a piece of code whose purpose has eluded the cybersecurity world since its existence was first revealed in an NSA leak in 2017. The SentinelOne researchers have now reverse-engineered the Fast16 code, which they say dates back to 2005 and was likely created by either the US government or one of its allies. Kamluk and Guerrero-Saade have determined that the Fast16 malware was designed to carry out the most subtle form of sabotage ever seen in an in-the-wild malware tool: By automatically spreading across networks and then silently manipulating computation processes in certain software applications that perform high-precision mathematical calculations and simulate physical phenomena, Fast16 can alter the results of those programs to cause failures that range from faulty research results to catastrophic damage to real-world equipment. Their analysis suggests that Fast16 might have been used in the mid-2000s specifically to subvert Iran's attempt to gain nuclear weapons, perhaps even years before Stuxnet was deployed to achieve the same result. Tap the 🔗 in bio to read the full story