Liam O Murchu

When Stuxnet surfaced in the summer of 2010 it looked like yet another Windows worm, just with an unusual number of zero-days. O Murchu and his colleagues spent months working out why it went looking for Siemens software. Falliere established that it rewrote the logic on specific PLCs driving frequency converters — and only when those converters ran at speeds typical of uranium centrifuges. The result, the W32.Stuxnet Dossier, is still the reference text.

To make the point to people who don't read ladder logic, Symantec built a demo in which an infected PLC inflated a balloon until it burst. O Murchu and Chien both appear in Alex Gibney's documentary Zero Days (2016).