Can computer hackers get inside your mind?

Summary

Planet Money – "Can computer hackers get inside your mind?"

Date: June 17, 2026
Hosts: Nick Fountain, Erica Barris
Guests: Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (“JAGS”), Vitaly Kamluk

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the shadowy world of cyber warfare by telling the story of “Fast 16”—a mysterious piece of malware uncovered by cybersecurity “paleontologists.” The show traces how this digital weapon didn’t just attack machines, but aimed to warp the very reality and sanity of the people using them. Through riveting interviews, the episode explores the intersection of cyber sabotage, human psychology, high-stakes geopolitics, and what it means to live in an era of “epistemological warfare”—where the line between fact and fiction is hacked.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Invisible War: Cyber Sabotage

• The US and Iran conflict isn't just fought with bombs—there's an invisible front of cyber sabotage, with “malware, computer viruses, and Jedi mind tricks” at play.
  [00:43] Nick Fountain: "There is a whole other almost entirely invisible war that the US and allies have been waging with Iran using cyber espionage—cyber sabotage. You know, computer viruses, malware."

Enter the Cyber Paleontologist

• Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS), a cyber “paleontologist” from Sentinel 1, digs through old malware to forensically reconstruct top-secret missions.
  [02:02] JAGS: "Some folks would say cyber paleontologist."
• He's famed enough to have his work on display at the International Spy Museum.
  [02:50] Erica Barris: "JAGS is kind of a big deal."

The Fast 16 Enigma: Bait for the Curious

• JAGS uncovers a cryptic entry—“Fast 16. Nothing to see here, CARRY ON”—in a leaked NSA malware list. It stands out for its oddity, acting almost like deliberate bait for curious hackers.
  [05:05] JAGS: "Just one line that's, like, completely different to all the other ones... it just says, fast 16. Nothing to see here, CARRY ON. That's it."
• The NSA’s instruction felt “like catnip, right? It felt like bait.”
  [05:34] JAGS: "You can't put that there... I couldn't let it go."

Years of Obsession and “The Valley of Despair”

• Despite his skills, JAGS couldn't crack the “Fast 16” code and got it tattooed—literally—on his arm as a reminder of the mystery.
  [07:18] JAGS: "You can see Fast 16 and—Nothing to see here."

Cyber Weapons and the Mind Game

• Fast 16’s importance recalled Stuxnet, the most famous cyber attack—which derailed Iran’s nuclear program by making its centrifuges malfunction while computers reported all was well, sowing confusion and mistrust.
  [11:33] JAGS: "So the operators are hearing that these things are, like, making these weird noises... but I'm looking at the computer and the computer tells me everything's normal."
• JAGS always suspected Stuxnet was just the tip of a much bigger, more devious iceberg.
  [12:28] JAGS: "Clearly we didn't even know about all the different things they were doing."

The AI Era Breakthrough

• New AI tools are deployed to analyze Fast 16. JAGS’s colleague, Vitaly Kamluk, takes on the challenge.
• Vitaly, typically Zen, emerges from weeks of deep reverse engineering “disturbed”—the malware is like “Stuxnet,” sharing foundational structure, but messes instead with high-precision math at the core of engineering calculations.
  [14:57] JAGS: "When you hear it from Vitaly, who is a very measured person, it makes you take pause."

Sabotage by (False) Arithmetic: The Attack on Truth

• Fast 16 tampers specifically with floating-point calculations—core mathematical operations in physics simulations, critical for engineering and even nuclear weapons research.
  [16:09] JAGS: “Think of it as, like, floating point math, like the really, really details based, hard calculation stuff... I’ve never run into a piece of malware that does that.”

The Target: Scientists and Engineers Working on...?

• Slow forensic research reveals Fast 16 looks for, and infects, specialized programs like LSDYNA—used for high-end, complex physics simulations, often in nuclear payload modeling.
  [21:05] JAGS: "The Good Isis has this report saying... Iranian scientists have been publicly putting out... they were using software that they shouldn't have been using."
• The software was linked to Iranian research on nukes.

The Mission Revealed: Sabotage and Gaslighting

• Fast 16 lies dormant until it detects LSDYNA is running physics simulations involving explosive pressure—a red flag for nuclear weapons design—then subtly tweaks the calculations.
  [23:04] Nick Fountain: “At that point, it would stay low key until it saw the computer doing these very specific tests... And that is when Fast16 would do its mayhem.”
• Critically, it was engineered to spread—so running the simulation elsewhere would yield the same wrong answers. The goal: psychologically break the scientists, erode their trust in themselves and their tools.
  [24:12] JAGS: "So the idea was to drive these people nuts, right? Like, it's right math, wrong answer, right formula, wrong answer over and over, everywhere you go... before you ever consider that the computers are wrong, you almost certainly look at these scientists and go, maybe you guys are clowns."

“Epistemological Warfare”: When Reality is Hacked

• The episode’s central insight is that Fast 16 didn’t simply break machines—it attacked its victims’ sense of certainty, a “war on knowledge and reality.”
  [28:36] Nick Fountain: “Is epistemological warfare what you would call this?”
  [28:45] JAGS: "I think epistemological warfare is a fascinating way to frame it."

  • “We take for granted how much we take for granted. Certainty... If you questioned everything in your life, you would be paralyzed.”
    [28:52] JAGS

• JAGS and Vitaly see this as a new age where digital weapons can not just destroy infrastructure but deeply disorient and manipulate human belief and trust.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On irresistible mysteries:
  [05:34] JAGS: "You can't put that there. Like, it's was like catnip, right? It felt like bait."
• On the psychological toll:
  [24:12] JAGS: "So the idea was to drive these people nuts, right?... Maybe you guys don't know what the hell you're doing."
• On the stakes:
  [27:57] Erica Barris: "Did it prevent nuclear war?"
• On epistemological warfare:
  [28:45] JAGS: "I think epistemological warfare is a fascinating way to frame it."
• On certainty:
  [28:52] JAGS: "We take for granted how much we take for granted. Certainty... If you questioned everything in your life, you would be paralyzed."

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:42 – 02:50: Introduction of the invisible cyber war & JAGS, the “cyber paleontologist”
• 05:05 – 07:18: Discovery of Fast 16; “Nothing to see here,” and JAGS’s obsession (tattoo)
• 09:24 – 11:49: The Stuxnet precedent and redefining cyber sabotage
• 13:17 – 16:09: How AI and team research cracked open Fast 16’s secrets
• 19:08 – 21:41: Forensic hunt for Fast 16’s mathematical “victims” and link to nuclear research
• 23:04 – 24:28: Fast 16’s sabotage method—tampering with simulations and spreading the wrong answer
• 28:36 – 29:24: Discussion of “epistemological warfare”—the war on certainty and reality

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Summary Takeaways

• “Fast 16” represents a new breed of cyber weapon: not merely infiltrating systems, but attacking the foundations of human knowledge—turning truth itself into a battleground.
• Through methodical, years-long research (and the help of AI tools), JAGS and team revealed how this malware could have sown chaos in nuclear weapons labs by subtly sabotaging math itself, leading scientists to doubt themselves, their methods, and perhaps even reality.
• The episode closes on the unsettling realization that in a digital age, warfare isn’t just about bombs or even data theft—it can be about warping what we think we know. As host Nick Fountain observes, “They seem well attuned to life in the computer age, life in the time of epistemological warfare.”

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This episode is a tour de force look at the intersection of hacking, psychology, nuclear geopolitics, and the fundamental human need for certainty in a world where even arithmetic can be hacked.

Transcript

[Sponsor/Announcer]

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[Erica Barris]

This is Planet Money from NPR. On Friday, if all goes according to plan, representatives from the US and Iran will meet in Geneva to sign a another 60 day ceasefire agreement. But the two sides still have not come to an agreement on what's been at the heart of this war and decades of conflict. Iran's development of nuclear weapons.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Right.

[Nick Fountain]

This conflict has been on again, off again for years. And while the most recent iteration has been very violent with bombs and blockades, there is a whole other almost entirely invisible war that that the U.S. and allies have been waging with Iran using cyber espionage or more accurately, cyber sabotage. You know, computer viruses, malware. Recently we heard a story about a piece of malware that might have been used in this invisible war that was diabolically cunning because it exploited weaknesses in computers. Yes, but also maybe in the human psyche. The more I think about it, the more I think this must have driven people insane. But it also might have saved the world from nuclear destruction.

[Erica Barris]

We heard about this hack from someone whose job it is to identify computer hacks that could be a threat to all of us.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

What's your name?

[Nick Fountain]

What do you do?

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

My name is Juan Andres Guerrero Sale, which is why everybody calls me jags.

[Erica Barris]

J, A, G, S. Jags. His initials are shorter and cooler.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, actually he is a pretty cool guy. He's got a faux hawk, sleeves of tattoos. He was on track to go get a PhD in philosophy, but now I'm

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

a security researcher who I think would be the simplest term, I think some folks would say cyber paleontologist.

[Erica Barris]

Cyber paleontologist, like he digs for the remnants of cyber attacks. JAGS works for a CyberSecurity company called Sentinel 1. It helps big companies like Samsung and the Golden State warriors and the government protect their computers and networks.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, hacking is a whole industry and defending against hacks is this whole other industry. JAGS just so happens to have the raddest job of all, which is dusting off old malware files buried deep on servers and reverse engineering how hackers got into systems in the first place and what they did when they got there. So he can figure out how to defend against similar attacks in the future.

[Erica Barris]

And JAGS is kind of a big deal. There are actually a couple of pieces in the International spy Museum in D.C. based on his cyber paleontology work.

[Nick Fountain]

This is a little crude but in the Jurassic park movie, which paleontologist are you?

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

As long as you don't immediately default to Jeff Goldblum and then you.

[Nick Fountain]

I was gonna go Jeff Goldblum, but I think that he is like a chaos theory mathematician, which I think fits the bill, right?

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

What the hell do I actually know about paleontology?

[Nick Fountain]

Right.

[Erica Barris]

We met up with Jags because we wanted to get a peek into the invisible war, because Jaggs has made a stunning discovery of a highly specialized, highly sophisticated cyber weapon.

[Nick Fountain]

Often these weapons don't even get detected. If they do, it's not usually until years later when someone like JAGS comes across an old fragment and. And tries to reconstruct what top secret mission the weapon was designed to carry out.

[Erica Barris]

For Jaggs, the fragment he found wasn't even a piece of code. It was just six words. It came from a leaked list of malware from the nsa.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, the list came from this tool the NSA had meant to help NSA operators while they were hacking into some computer in enemy territory, figure out whether some other other hacker was already there, and if so, whether they were friends or foes.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Essentially, it'll run all these checks, and it's going to give the operator, it's going to give a list of instructions of saying, hey, look, suspicious thing here. We don't know what that is. Known malware, pull back.

[Nick Fountain]

Like little warning signs. And this was a budding cyber paleontologist's dream. Each piece of malware on that list had the potential to teach you so much about how the world's top hackers were getting the job done. And maybe one would turn out to be an incredibly sophisticated cyber weapon.

[Erica Barris]

Jaggs, with great excitement, got a hold of this list and started scouring it for something he should start digging into. And one item screamed, look here, there's one.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Just one line that's, like, completely different to all the other ones, okay? And it just says, fast 16. Nothing to see here, Carry on in all caps. That's it. There's nothing else like it.

[Nick Fountain]

Fast 16 was what the NSA was calling the malware and the cryptic instruction the agency was giving its operators. Not seek help or pull back. Simply nothing to see here, carry on.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

You can't put that there. Like, it's was like catnip, right? It felt like bait. We couldn't let it go. I couldn't let it go.

[Nick Fountain]

He didn't let it go. He had to know what this thing was. What did it do? What was its target? The NSA seemed to know about it, but who made it and what was so top, top, top secret that the NSA was resorting to Jedi mind tricks to try to keep its own people in the dark?

[Erica Barris]

At this point, Jaggs just had the name of this malware, fast 16. Just a tibia, but he was able to use that to dig up the rest of the bones. Basically, he rummaged around this, like, public library of suspected malware until he found it. And eventually he was able to put together the pieces of the skeleton that is fast 16. But still, when he tried to reverse engineer it to understand what its secret mission was, he couldn't.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

I worked these, like, cracked out nights, and very often I'll run into something, I'm like, oh, my God, I found this amazing thing. And then by the morning, you're like, no, this. This doesn't work.

[Nick Fountain]

We call this the Valley of Despair.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Oh, yes. I. I have built a home in the Valley of Despair. I. I'm pro. I'm in the process of gentrifying the Valley of Despair. If any of you would like to join me there.

[Nick Fountain]

After many, many fruitless nights, weeks, months, Jags had to turn to other projects and had to put fast 16 down. But to remind him of what was not solved, he inked Fast 16 on his skin forever.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Fast 16 has been on the back of my arm for a while.

[Nick Fountain]

You got it tattooed? Oh, yeah. Where is fast 16?

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

You can see fast 16 and. Nothing to see here.

[Nick Fountain]

Nothing to see here. Carry on. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Nick Fountain.

[Erica Barris]

And I'm Erica Barris. Today on the show Nothing to see here. Carry on.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah. Jag sets out to solve the mystery of fast 16 and finds a cyber weapon with the potential to chip away at our very grasp of reality.

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[Nick Fountain]

mysterious piece of malware that was so secret that the NSA was using Jedi mind tricks to try to keep their people away from it? And so enticing that security researchers, or at least one over caffeinated, keyboard wielding security researcher, got it tattooed on his tricep.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Theoretical tricep, yes.

[Erica Barris]

Jaggs said researcher was pretty blocked. But he knew he had to keep at it because he had a hunch that Fast 16 might reveal important details about that invisible side of the conflicts we read about every day. Like back when security researchers discovered a cyber sabotage operation that blew everyone's mind. It was called Stuxnet.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, Stuxnet is kind of the mother of all cyber sabotage operations.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

In many ways, my industry is birthed by the discovery of Stuxnet.

[Nick Fountain]

For those not familiar, Stuxnet was this absolutely bonkers hacking operation that reportedly slowed down Iran's nuclear program back in the mid 2000s. And to hear jags describe it, it totally redefined what was possible.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

So before Stuxnet, if you went to these antivirus conferences with a lot of fun gals and guys, the possibility of cyber espionage was discussed as. That as a possibility.

[Nick Fountain]

It was theoretical.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

It was theoretical.

[Nick Fountain]

It might be cool. This might be happening.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Yeah. You're like, there's no way. People won't. There's value there. Of course, as. And then, you know, Stuxnet is discovered and you realize not only has this been happening and at a scale and capacity way above anything we'd ever found before, but it's been happening for years.

[Erica Barris]

What had been happening was that Israel and the US Allegedly had used cyber weapons to destroy real world physical things. They did this by managing to get a thumb drive into Iran and inserting malware into the computer network at the heart of their uranium enrichment program, the system that controlled the centrifuges.

[Nick Fountain]

And Stuxnet was very, very clever. It spread throughout the network and carefully noted how everything looked when it was working normally, saved that, and then gave the centrifuges instructions to go haywire. Speeding up and slowing down and braking, all while making everything in the computer system look a. Okay, look normal.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

So the operators are hearing that these things are like making these weird noises. They're spinning up. They sound like, it sounds like things aren't going well in this room next door, but I'm looking at the computer and the computer tells me everything's normal.

[Erica Barris]

All in all, Stuxnet reportedly destroyed a fifth of all the centrifuges that Iran was using. It led to nuclear scientists getting fired. And most importantly, it is widely believed to have slowed down Iran's nuclear program.

[Nick Fountain]

And to the cyber paleontologists of the world like Jaggs, when the bones of Stuxnet were dug up, they revealed this whole new age of cyber warfare. But Jaggs always believed that Stuxnet was just a hint of what was out

[Erica Barris]

there, just a tibia.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Clearly we didn't even know about all the different things they were doing.

[Erica Barris]

So year after year, Jaggs remained committed to figuring out his white whale, figuring out the puzzle of fast 16. Who made it? Who were they targeting? What exactly were they doing to that target? And how? But he didn't make much progress until earlier this year for a very this year reason. AI.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah. Here's why. Jaggs heads a big team of researchers at his cybersecurity firm. And like everyone else these days, he was wondering, could these new AI tools help us in our jobs? Could they do our jobs? Could they do a job that was so hard even I Jags couldn't do it. Could they solve the puzzle that is fast 16?

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

There is no public guide to solving it. If it's going to figure it out, it's going to have to figure it out. Just in this little sandbox with a few tools and go, all right, kid, like, what can you do?

[Erica Barris]

Jaggs sent a colleague to oversee these AI tests. That colleague was Vitaly Kamluk, a Belarusian cybersecurity researcher who also has a faux hawk. He lives in Singapore, and according to Jaggs, is very Zen like.

[Nick Fountain]

And Jax has Vitaly like any self respecting human. He decided to John Henry style, try to beat the machines.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

I, being put in that position, would have said, cool, let's go make the AI sweat. And Vitaly, being a much more patient, Zen master style dude, he said, well, if I'm going to know if it's doing well, I need to know what this thing does. And Vitaly spent like two weeks in a black dark hole somewhere not answering messages. Nothing. I was like, is this guy okay? Like, what happened to Vitaly? And all of a sudden I get a message from Vitaly. Super late, I guess for him. Yeah, yeah, it was like about 1am or so. He's like, hey, man, like, I need to talk Jax. Yeah, we need to talk.

[Erica Barris]

This, of course, is Vitaly Kamluk, reverse engineering legend.

[Nick Fountain]

He describes you as Zen. Like, do you think that's fair? Zen, like, yes.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Does it make me more peaceful and simple? I hope so.

[Nick Fountain]

But, but on this call, he was not very Zen, like Vitaly said. He'd done the reverse engineering, and he'd had the AI models double and triple check his work. And now Jack says he seemed pretty disturbed.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

He's like, look, I, I, I need you to test me here. But, like, all the models at least agree with me. So I now need to talk to a human being. This is Stuxnet. Like, and I hear that kind of nonsense from students, right? Like, you know, I hear this kind of. I'm like a lightning rod. Anybody in this industry is a lightning round for, like, DMs, from people clearly having, like, schizophrenic episodes about, like, the government spying on me. So you hear this kind of stuff all the time. When you hear it from Vitaly, who is a very measured person, it makes you take pause. You go, okay, what are you talking about? What do you mean?

[Erica Barris]

Vitaly explained they're from the same era, the mid 2000s, and even though they don't share any code, they seem to share similar architecture. But Vitaly couldn't figure out what exactly Fast 16's mission was, only that it targeted the part of a computer that did complex math.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Think of it as, like, floating point math, like the really, really details based, hard calculation stuff that most of the time you never deal with. And I've never run into a piece of malware that does that.

[Erica Barris]

Jag says he's never seen malware that messed with high precision math. Most spy malware is designed to steal data or, like, in Stuxnet, make things go haywire. But this one was basically telling the computer, two plus two equals five.

[Nick Fountain]

So at this point, Jags had found Fast 16 buried in a cyber library based on a hunch that it was something to pay attention to. And Vitaly had confirmed it was because who messes with math? And maybe more importantly, whose math were they messing with?

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Who is running high precision calculations back in 2005, doing something so interesting that it got somebody to build a super specific custom piece of malware to modify and mess with their workloads. Everything about this thing screams special. Like, it screams unique, it screams groundbreaking. And I think what's most excruciating about it is that the mystery won't yield. Like, you just kind of have to keep pushing and say, okay, why?

[Erica Barris]

After the break.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Okay, I guess we're back to the trenches of like, okay, how do we nail this thing?

[Erica Barris]

Jags puts all the pieces together.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Support for NPR comes from IBM. On Smart Talks with IBM, host Malcolm Gladwell speaks with leaders who are pushing the boundaries of AI and technology in partnership with IBM. Hello. Hello.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM. I sat down with Alon Cohen, who leads research and development at ufc, to discuss the complexity of using technology to analyze fight data. With kick to the head, it makes contact with the outside of my arm, which I brought up. In our world, that's. That's a blocked strike. Yeah, but teaching a computer what exactly that means and when and how, like when my arm is up, that's a block. When my arm is down and hits my shoulder, that's not. It's those nuances that proved incredibly difficult for machines to be able to handle for a very, very long time. That is, until IBM entered the octagon.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Listen to Smart Talks with IBM wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

This message comes from Schwab. With the new Schwab Teen Investor account, teens can gain hands on investing experience. It's co owned by and your teen so you can monitor the account while your teen learns how to invest and manage money.

[Erica Barris]

Learn [e-mail] so Jags and Vitaly, still separated by a 12 hour time difference, set out to answer their next question. Whose math was fast 16 designed to target?

[Nick Fountain]

And pretty quickly they come upon a major clue by looking at a rules engine embedded in Fast16's code. Like a list of instructions. Basically, if then rules. If fast 16 sees something happen on

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

a computer, then it goes, oh, I've recognized this thing. What does my rule engine say? Oh, if I find this thing, then I need to change these six bytes into these six other bytes. If I find this thing, then I need to set this thing back into whatever the old value was if I find this thing, right, but what the hell do those six bytes represent?

[Nick Fountain]

So they start scanning old systems and software from way back in the day, looking for those strings of bytes. Jack says it was like looking through a mathematician's notebook of scribbles for a particular string of numbers. Which is not easy, and it's not like old code just exists out in the wild. But eventually they do find a few pieces of software that contain some of those same strings of six bytes, which all had to do with complex physics modeling, like how to design a car that'll crumple safely when it crashes or A bridge that will withstand an earthquake.

[Erica Barris]

For Vitaly, the idea that someone was targeting calculations that were supposed to keep us safe was incredibly disturbing.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Like, do they have limits really? Like it's just a new type of kind of evil ideas. I felt that the target was scientists, civil engineers corrupt the air calculation results and that would eventually produce risks for lives of others. So I was terrified. Like, why would people do that?

[Nick Fountain]

Very soon they had a breakthrough that kind of answered the question. JAGS was searching around for one of those pieces of software. It's called LSDyna, it's short for Livermore Software Dynamic Analysis.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Something that I run into right away as I'm looking up lsdyna. And is this report by the good isis. The Good isis, that's what they call themselves. I don't know what ISIS stands for. It's some kind of think tank. The Good ISIS Institute for something or other. And the good ISIS has this report saying if you look back at this research that Iranian scientists have been publicly putting out, you can see that they were using software that they shouldn't have been using.

[Nick Fountain]

They knew that these guys had this piece of software. LSDyna.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Yeah. And what's interesting is the example they put for LSDYNA is trying to figure out the right explosive materials for nuclear payloads.

[Erica Barris]

In other words, this documentation from the Institute of Science and International Security seemed to suggest that the software Fast 16 was supposed to mess with was being used by Iranian nuclear scientists to maybe design nuclear bombs.

[Nick Fountain]

So that was the Software that the Fast 16 malware was likely targeting. Telling it, if you find these bytes, change them to these other ones. But why change those specific bytes? What would changing the math in this software achieve?

[Erica Barris]

To solve that part of the puzzle, they had to get their hands on that software. The Iranian scientists were using a very bespoke. Bespoke piece of physics modeling software released decades ago, very much not on the app Store.

[Nick Fountain]

Did you pay for it?

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

No, you can't buy it. You can't just buy it. And moreover, people don't love it when you're like, hey, do you happen to have a copy of your software from 21 years ago? Like, why? Don't worry about it, don't worry about it. Just, you know, so you gotta get your hands on this thing somehow.

[Nick Fountain]

And Jags and Vitale did. And what they found was that Fast 16 was designed to hide in scientists computers and do nothing, basically to keep watch, to wait for LSDYNA to get installed. At that point, it would stay low key until it saw the computer Doing these very specific tests that only someone developing a nuclear warhead would be doing had to do with the pressure calculations to simulate a nuclear explosion. And that is when Fast16 would do its mayhem. At the point when the engineers got near the pressure they needed, Fast 16 would throw those calculations off by changing the math. The old two plus two equals five trick.

[Erica Barris]

And furthermore, it was designed to spread from computer to computer.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

The idea being that if you. If I come to this computer and I run this simulation workload and go, hey, those results don't look right, let's go try this other computer. And you go, and you run it in the other one. That, too, will give you the. The right wrong answer.

[Nick Fountain]

The exact same wrong answer exactly.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

So the idea was to drive these people nuts, right? Like, you go and, like, it's right math, wrong answer, right formula, wrong answer over and over, everywhere you go. And you probably don't know that it's wrong until you then go and try to do another thing with it. And you go, damn it. This thing is not working.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, right?

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Like, it's devious. The cunning of this attack is truly fascinating because at some point, I think before you ever consider that the computers are wrong, you almost certainly look at these scientists and go, maybe you guys are clowns. Maybe you guys don't know what the hell you're doing.

[Erica Barris]

Jaggs and Vitaly were flabbergasted by the sophistication and the technical problem prowess of this malware from decades ago. Not just the Cody parts, but also the deep knowledge of nuclear physics.

[Nick Fountain]

And after so many late nights of being haunted by Fast 16, Jags and Vitaly were finally able to announce in April of this year that fast 16, which they'd started looking into on a hunch, was indeed a major cyberweapon whose mission seemed like it was to sabotage Iran's nuclear development program. Was it worth the wait?

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Oh, absolutely. I mean, walking around with this, like, bag of open questions, right?

[Erica Barris]

Yeah. There are still some unknowns. Number one, we don't know definitively that this was targeting Iran. For example, North Korea also had nuclear ambitions at that time.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

You look back, you go, well, North Korea was having a whole lot of problems with their missile program back then. We don't know where all these things were being used. We just know of one target that they definitely used this kind of stuff against, which is Iran.

[Nick Fountain]

You're that confident?

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Look, let's put it a different way, right? We've never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever heard of anybody doing this kind of cyber Sabotage anywhere, for anything other than the Iranian nuclear program in the same era as when fast 16 is developed.

[Nick Fountain]

Thing number two, we don't know who did this. It has echoes of Stuxnet, which is widely reported to have been deployed by the US and Israel. But when we reached out to the NSA and the CIA and the Israeli Defense Forces and asked them, was fast 16U, they didn't deny it.

[Erica Barris]

They didn't confirm it either.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, that's true, too. The IDF never got back to us, and the others said, basically, sorry, but we have nothing to offer you on this.

[Erica Barris]

Jags, for his part, also checked in with them.

[Nick Fountain]

Before you publish, do you reach out to the US And Israeli intelligence community and ask them, are we going to blow your cover?

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Yeah, yeah, but I won't go too far into that.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Right.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Like, most of the time, we are good collaborators and good friends.

[Nick Fountain]

Do these meetings happen in person? Was there any pushback this time?

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

No.

[Nick Fountain]

Meaning? We're not worried about you blowing our cover, you weird paleontologist. This stuff is 20 years old.

[Erica Barris]

Right. And the third thing we don't know is why the NSA wrote in reference to Fast 16, the instructions, nothing to see here. Carry on. Was that, like, with a wink?

[Nick Fountain]

One day, when this stuff is declassified, we might get an answer to all three of those questions, but we're much less likely to figure out, did Fast 16 change history? Jack says he sure was deployed because he couldn't have found it otherwise. But, like, did it slow down Iran's or someone's nuclear program? Did it bring them to the bargaining table?

[Erica Barris]

Yeah. Did it prevent nuclear war?

[Nick Fountain]

And the last enduring mystery? How did fast 16 mess with the minds of the scientists who encountered it? Like, I have this picture in my head of the nuclear scientists in Iran working on this project of intense national significance. Presumably, their boss's boss was constantly giving updates to Iran's president or the Ayatollah. And these scientists would have been doing their experiments. Right. And then infuriatingly getting the wrong answer. Is epistemological warfare what you would call this?

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

If I had called it that, they would have said I was just being pretentious. I wouldn't have allowed myself that. As a repentant philosopher.

[Nick Fountain]

Yeah, but as a repentant philosopher, yeah, sure.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

I think epistemological warfare is a fascinating way to frame it.

[Nick Fountain]

Break that out a little for me.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

Well, I think the. We take for granted how much we take for granted. Certainty. People think that certainty is a. Is a matter of. Of coherent deduction, that somehow you're sitting here and you have this perfect, cohesive worldview. That's not actually how it works. That's not how anything works. If you questioned everything in your life, you would be paralyzed, right? If you questioned that when you, you know, get out of bed, you don't know if, like, the floor is gonna hold you, right? You wouldn't be able to function.

[Nick Fountain]

Jags told us about an interaction he recently had with Vitaly that kind of brings this home. They were in Singapore, where Vitaly lives on their way to a hacker conference to present their fast 16 research.

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

He gets us on a train and he goes, oh, look, it's a driverless train. The train just, you know, and

[Sponsor/Announcer]

I

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

can't remember, we were talking about something to do with fast 16. He stops and he goes, I mean, this is precisely the kind of system that you would degrade with this kind of attack. You know, there was a collision and they said there was no cyber attack involved. And then we look at each other and we go, you know, you kind of shrug and you go, well, as far as we know, right?

[Nick Fountain]

What I find fascinating is that these experts who spend their lives staring at computers, who know their capabilities more than anyone, are also some of the most skeptical people when it comes to trusting computers. Does that ever get to you?

[Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade (JAGS)]

No, no, I, I, I don't know. I'm telling you, man, I'm not wired. Quite the right way.

[Nick Fountain]

To me, questioning everything does seem paralyzing, but they seem well attuned to life in the computer age, life in the time of epistemological warfare. If you are an intelligence operative who has info on a clandestine operation and want to tell me about it, you can reach me at you know, who am I kidding? You know how to find me.

[Erica Barris]

And if you live outside, outside the United States, we also need your help. For Planet Money Summer School, we are scouring the world for the most interesting, surprising economic ideas that should spread. Think like a different way to do taxes. A mega project that came in under budget. Somehow rent is cheap. Get in touch and tell us about an idea the world should know about. Email [e-mail] and put Summer school in the subject. We might use your idea on the podcast. This episode was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact checked by Charlotte Isidore and engineer by Kwesi Lee. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

[Nick Fountain]

Special thanks to the research team at Symantec who also dug into fast 16. Andy Greenberg from Wired, who broke the story. Kim Zetter, who wrote the definitive book about Stuxnet and David Albright of and I can't believe I'm saying this, the Good isis, which now I know stands for the Institute for Science and International Security. JAGS has a podcast with also a funny name. It's called the three Buddy Problem. I'm Nick Fountain.

[Erica Barris]

And I'm Erica Barras. This is npr. Thanks for listening.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

This message comes from Capital One. Capital One offers checking accounts with no fees or minimums. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital1.com bankguy for details. Capital1NA Member FDIC this message comes from

[Malcolm Gladwell]

St. Martin's Press, publisher of how to Try Again by Steve Kam. Some people wake up at 4am Run 15 miles, and optimize every moment of their day. How to Try Again is a book for everyone else. It's about quitting unhealthy expectations, failing compassionately, and trying again differently. Blending empathy, humor and real advice, how to Try Again will help you make change that sticks. How to Try Again by Steve Kam is available wherever books are sold. This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive. For more Capella University's flexpath Learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at Capella. Eduardo.