In early 2009, Iran’s secret proram to build nuclear weapons suffered a series of mysterious failures. Centrifuge machines used to purify uranium suddenly spun out of control and tore themselves apart. More than a thousand machines were destroyed, and Iran’s pursuit of the bomb was seriously delayed. It turned out that the machines had been sabotaged by a computer virus called Stuxnet, a sophisticated malware developed by Israel and the United States.

The attack demonstrated that hackers can not only take control of computer systems, but also reach through those systems to create physical effects in the real world. Today there’s a whole subspeciality of the cyber security field called “cyber physical” devoted to stuydying this kind of attack, and I’m fortunate to have with me today one of the leading lights, Dr Krishna Sampigethaya, a professor at Embry Riddle Aeronatical University, who will talk to us about its relevance to aviation and specifically to MH370. I ask him whether, in his view, MH370 could have been the victim of a cyber-physical attack.

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