Tech Insider reports: The United States had a top-secret operation that gave it the ability to shut down much of Iran’s infrastructure ahead of a full-scale war, without a single bomb being dropped.

The incredible insight into a highly-classified cyber operation called Nitro Zeus was first exposed in the film “Zero Days” and later corroborated by The New York Times, which interviewed intelligence and military officials who were involved.

The film, directed by Alex Gibney, premieres on Friday.

“We spent hundreds of millions, maybe billions on it,” an anonymous National Security Agency source says in the film. “We were inside, waiting, watching. Ready to disrupt, degrade, and destroy those systems with cyber attacks. In comparison, Stuxnet was a back alley operation. [Nitro Zeus] was the plan for a full scale cyber war with no attribution.”

The source, whose face and voice are concealed throughout the film, is later revealed to be an actor reciting lines from testimony offered to Director Alex Gibney by CIA and NSA employees.

The focus of the “Zero Days” film is on Stuxnet — the world’s first cyber weapon — that was used against Iran’s nuclear facilities. But in researching for the film, Gibney found that malicious software was just one small piece of a much larger puzzle. [Continue reading…]