We will probably never know how they did it, but I hope I can read about it one day.
There is not much evidence that Israel's cyber warfare capabilities exceeds that of other states. However, Israel is clearly less reluctant than other states to use what they have offensively. Perhaps because Israel would suffer virtually no diplomatic fallout from getting caught and because it would be Iranians - not Israeli agents - who would be hanged.
Personally, I think praising Israel's cyber warfare is like praising pedophiles for amazing tech savyness for running child pornography rings undetected for so long. It leaves a bad taste, especially since Israel is trying to rebrand itself as a tech leader. The idea is that we should forget about its ongoing human rights abuses and gawk at all the tech Israel is producing.
Israeli cyber warriors are known to be among the best in the world, on par with anything other major powers have to offer.
Despite that someone is able to either convince or trick some of the workers to do something that comes at a huge personal risk. Human hacking is no less interesting than software/hardware hacking
The fact that western intelligence agencies and especially the Israelis managed to develop a network of assets in Iran is marvel of tradecraft.
US has top notch intelligence.
A lot of Israel operations are done through recruiting and paying dissidents. Iran is a big country and their rulers have made many internal enemies and aren't that competent in general. Israel is just using this weakness to incur as much damage it can either to the infrastructure or by killing civilians (eg. scientists being exploded in front of their homes) without any apparent consequence from the so called "free world".
So should we celebrate how those who radicalized these mass shooters online have such sophisticated cyber capabilities?
This seems unlikely. Iran's nuclear facilities aren't overly important compared to things like their oil production or likely any military facility, and there is incredibly detailed information available about the site in question as a result of many nuclear inspections.
Whilst you would expect most airgapped systems to also be in buildings that intentionally block signals, there are a ton of "unexpected" interactions, some of which may give you ways to remotely transmit when no transmission is expected to be possible.
Like the fact that USB 3.0 can interfere with the 2.4Ghz spectrum [0], thanks to resonance.
Israel has also previously demonstrated malware called Odini [1] and aIR-Jumper [2] to bypass Faraday protections around systems and exfiltrate data.
[0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/io/uni...
[1] https://www.rambus.com/blogs/bypassing-air-gapped-faraday-ca...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/09/attac...
So it does appear to be someone at the facility.
I would suspect that most Iranians, regardless of if they are for or against the nuclear program, just want sanction relief and don’t care how they get it. At the end of the day, most people just want to have a good life and sanction relief will help that happen.
Self defence isn't aggression. If you provide a credible threat against me, you better believe I'll punch you in the face and knock you out first.
Since the alignment of the gulf states with the US, the only obstacle to that is Iran and Iranian influence.
Because of this, Israel is very willing for Iran to be militarily destroyed, and members of the Israeli government have called for the invasion of Iran multiple times.
Simply self defence is far from the goal. Israel would not be able to survive without changing its internal structure unless the Arab world is dominated by the US which prevents actions that go against Israeli interests.