WASHINGTON — 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.
