The Atlantic

The Cyberwar Information Gap

Unlike a conventional military strike, state-on-state cyberattacks can go unreported for years.
Source: Korean Central News Agency / Handout via Reuters

U.S. government hackers began developing destructive malware meant to disrupt Iran’s nascent nuclear program as early as 2006, and deployed an early version of the worm in Iran the following year. But it wasn’t until 2010 that the first public reports about the cyberattack—dubbed Stuxnet—began to surface.

At around the same time as the U.S. was working on Stuxnet, it attempted a similar attack on North Korea’s nuclear program. That effort failed: The malware never reached the computers that controlled the country’s nuclear centrifuges. But it wasn’t , years after it happened. Just this weekend, a series

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