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The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

quora.com

1–10 of 507 posts

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#5
post #3

So.... For people who have followed this story more closely then i have, did the hostile actor ever get identified? Last i checked it was a toss up between USA, Israel and France, was a conclusion ever drawn?

The current belief is that it was a joint effort between at least Israel and the USA.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#7
post #3

So.... For people who have followed this story more closely then i have, did the hostile actor ever get identified? Last i checked it was a toss up between USA, Israel and France, was a conclusion ever drawn?

The current belief is that it was a joint effort between at least Israel and the USA.

Considering that Israel is the nation always mongering war against Iran I second you.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#8
I've been arguing about this for the last three days. Mostly around the reason that "complexity" is not strictly the same thing as "sophistication" when it comes to software. Noobs will conflate the two, but experienced programmers will agree that -- just to illustrate my point -- some code which solves a complex problem in a very clever way while also being very clean and easy to maintain will be considered strictly more sophisticated than some other code solving a similar problem which simply has a higher degree of complexity than the former. There is a subtle difference when it comes to software, and this subtlety needs to be considered in this question. Now, I think Stuxnet is a fantastic suggestion to this question, for a number of reasons:

1) The legal, ethical, technical challenges of creating the software.

2) The ability of the software to remain hidden in (sophisticated) environments rich with (sophisticated) organizations looking for exactly this kind of thing.

3) The stealth of the entire research, design, development, and deployment phases of the project.

4) The highly specialized nature of the target.

5) The scale of the entities involved.

6) All of this sophistication and we can't even see the source code (decompilation doesn't count).

This is frankly some impressively sophisticated software. Also, incidentally, the Quora poster's company looks like a fun place to work (with good programmers on the team). Some of his other answers are thoughtful and interesting to read, too, if you get the chance.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#9
If this short read piked your interest in Stuxnet, I can recommend the book "Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon".

It explains in great detail how Stuxnet worked and, which I found the most exciting, how it was discovered and reverse engineered.

Re: The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

#10
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current belief is that it was a joint effort between at least Israel and the USA.

Considering that Israel is the nation always mongering war against Iran I second you.

Really? You mean Iran doesn’t mind the odd chlorine attack on civilians in Syria Iran? There are definitely two sides to this but yours isn’t one.
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