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A highly sophisticated COMPUTER worm that has spread through Iran, Indonesia and India was built to destroy operations at one target: possibly Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor.

That's the EMERGING consensus of security experts who have examined the Stuxnet worm. In recent weeks, they've broken the cryptographic code behind the SOFTWARE and taken a look at how the worm operates in test environments. Researchers studying the worm all AGREE that Stuxnet was built by a very sophisticated and CAPABLE attacker -- possibly a nation state -- and it was designed to destroy something big.

Whoever created Stuxnet developed four previously unknown zero-day attacks and a peer-to-peer communications system, compromised digital certificates belonging to Realtek Semiconductor and JMicron Technology, and displayed extensive knowledge of industrial systems. This is not something that your run-of-the-mill hacker can pull off.

Many aspects of Stuxnet are so completely different from malware as we know it that it's only natural that so many hard-working experts at some point in the analysis ended in frustration. The best way to approach Stuxnet is not to think of it as a piece of malware like Sasser or Zotob, but to think of it as part of an operation -- operation myrtus. Operation myrtus can be broken down into three major stages: Preparation, infiltration, and execution.