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The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written

quora.com

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

#441

Post by badminton1 »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #266
perlgeek wrote: post #236

I'd argue that Google Search is much more sophisticated than Stuxnet. Windows is much more sophisticated. Linux is more sophisticated than Stuxnet. The list goes on. We tend to ignore the sophistication of things we are familiar with, and hype those that surprise. But that's not a fair measure of anything.

In my view, the sophistication is implied by the breadth of expertise required to put the whole thing together. Google Search and the OS landscape are for sure broad and sophisticated. However, their development was accomplished by computer scientists. In order for stuxnet to be effective, it was necessary to employ expertise in: - Uranium enrichment methods and processes - Capital equipment control systems and their…

Or just like: how do you mess up a centrifuge controlled by SCADA without them knowing? just change the speed and report another speed, done.

You don't need to know classical mechanics to use a bike, or know about internal combustion engines to use a car.

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

#444

Post by vkou »

Bekwnn wrote: post #340
27182818284 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> const int CENTRIFUGE_RPM = 1203; As the linked article points out, it wasn't just raising the speed, it was raising it in a subtle enough way to ruin the process while other experts routinely monitored the system

Most importantly it worked very successfully. With Windows, Google search, or most of the others mentioned here, they have had a huge number of problems. The word used was "sophisticated." I think that also implies some level of near-flawlessness in the end result.

99.99% of the time, Windows works just fine for me.

Stuxnet only needed to work once.

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

#445

Post by jerkstate »

tripplethrendo wrote: post #371
jerkstate wrote: post #282

Weird how the US IC developed and deployed such advanced software while agreeing that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons.

Do we know it was the US IC? I think its likely that it was Mossad.

by most accounts, it was a joint effort. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/06/confirmed-us-isr... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/stuxn...

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

#446

Post by chris_wot »

vkou wrote: post #444
Bekwnn wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most importantly it worked very successfully. With Windows, Google search, or most of the others mentioned here, they have had a huge number of problems. The word used was "sophisticated." I think that also implies some level of near-flawlessness in the end result.

99.99% of the time, Windows works just fine for me. Stuxnet only needed to work once.

It worked multiple times. And it needed to propagate, undetected, for months until it made its way into the nuclear facility.

It didn’t just work once.

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

#447

Post by chris_wot »

Jach wrote: post #319
lucideer wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second piece of code is not more complex, but it is (presumably) a lot more sophisticated. The fact that I had to prefix that with "(presumably)"—i.e. I can't actually tell using my own expertise—is evidence of that.

Have you written motor control software before? If you haven't that might be why you can't tell. Whenever hardware is involved, with perhaps sometimes the exception of GPUs and workstation CPUs, I've noticed people's intuitions get a lot less reliable -- it's sort of like looking up the programming abstraction tower, lexical closures with higher-order functions to compute derivatives can seem awfully sophisticated to…

Uh, that’s one small but important conponent of Stuxnet. The complexity is in the delivery mechanism, and the way it disguised itself, and the way it actually broke the centrifuges.

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

#448

Post by bichiliad »

The title of this post is a bit misleading (and a bit click-bait-y) — this is one person's response to a quora question, and it seems like the point of his answer was more "the Stuxnet worm is a seriously complex piece of history if you don't know about it" and less "this is the definitive most sophisticated piece of software ever." I feel like we can agree that the definition of sophisticated[0] is fairly hard to quantify and rank software objectively against.

[0]: "(of a machine, system, or technique) developed to a high degree of complexity", according to google: https://www.google.com/search?q=define+sophisticated

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

#449

Post by mosew »

ezekg wrote: post #344
kikowi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are not a book type of person, I recommend watching the movie Zero Days :)

IMDB link: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5446858/ (2016) Looks good! Might have to check it out tonight.

https://www.hulu.com/watch/1167116

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

#450

Post by nyolfen »

masswerk wrote: post #338
ams6110 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 60 years of treating every other country as a box in a threat model to be manipulated against other boxes has been a completely unmitigated disaster Has it? The last 60 years have been relatively peaceful, by historical standards.

You want to ask all those who lost their lives in any of the numerous conflicts. Only, because the big clash didn't happen (it nearly happened three times in 1983), this doesn't mean that there weren't any conflicts. E.g., the biggest air war in history, in Laos, even was conducted in secrecy, African politics is just a single mess, etc.

we ought to ask people whose family members have died of cancer lately how they feel about our so-called advanced medical science as well
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