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I have trouble believing that any moderately sane or respectable nation state would deploy this thing. It's roughly the equivalent of launching thousands of mis

I have trouble believing that any moderately sane or respectable nation state would deploy this thing. It's roughly the equivalent of launching thousands of missiles at completely random targets around the world, but programming them to only go off if they land on the enemy, hopefully. It also opens a Pandora's box of mutations and clones. It's far too evil and stupid for any country below NK insanity levels.

bkmartin 16y ago
My first guess was that it was the US. Yes, I'm a citizen of the US. I do believe my country would do this. If this isn't the US, and we aren't creating things like this, then I would be completely shocked. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it came out that we've been developing things like this for the last 5 to 10 years. Our government has historically never been behind when it comes to tech weapons innovations, at least not in the last 70 years.
tptacek 16y ago
You got downvoted, but I think this is exactly right: very low chance of decisive success, maximal chance of embarrassing international incident. Not a good way to attack a rival regional power.
- nl 16y ago
  Ok, I get your argument that this is overstated, and I wouldn't be surprised if you are right. But why would someone have written it then? It's not like they were using it to try and steal credit card numbers of send spam emails. It had a very specific purpose, and according to the linked article didn't seem to require manual intervention to turn on (or off?). It seems to have been a one-shot thing - wait for a specific set of events, and then run that mystery command. Blackmail/Ransom theories are easier to believe than a state-run cyber war program - but the reported logic of the program seems to make it pretty hard to blackmail someone with. It appears to have been designed to cause maximum damage once, with as little warning as possible. That's the opposite of what you want with a ransom/blackmail situation.
azernik 16y ago
Big difference between this and missiles: with missiles you have to pay extra per shot. With this, you release one into the wild and from then the marginal cost to send out more copies is orders of magnitude lower than the original development cost. As for "mutations and clones" - these are computer viruses, not the organic kind. People can imitate the techniques and develop on them, but as long as copies from and to USB drives maintain their multiple-9s accuracy there won't be much spontaneous change outside of the deployer's control. Instead, the big uncertainty factor with worms and viruses has usually been emergent behavior when the infected computers network into one very large system, leading to behaviors that don't show up in small-scale tests. The way it's described, Stuxnet is inherently limited both by its transmission method - USB sticks - and by its target systems - large embedded systems, typically not network-connected, and with a very standard configuration provided from Siemens.

bkmartin 16y ago

My first guess was that it was the US. Yes, I'm a citizen of the US. I do believe my country would do this. If this isn't the US, and we aren't creating things like this, then I would be completely shocked. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it came out that we've been developing things like this for the last 5 to 10 years. Our government has historically never been behind when it comes to tech weapons innovations, at least not in the last 70 years.

tptacek 16y ago

You got downvoted, but I think this is exactly right: very low chance of decisive success, maximal chance of embarrassing international incident. Not a good way to attack a rival regional power.

nl 16y ago
Ok, I get your argument that this is overstated, and I wouldn't be surprised if you are right. But why would someone have written it then? It's not like they were using it to try and steal credit card numbers of send spam emails. It had a very specific purpose, and according to the linked article didn't seem to require manual intervention to turn on (or off?). It seems to have been a one-shot thing - wait for a specific set of events, and then run that mystery command. Blackmail/Ransom theories are easier to believe than a state-run cyber war program - but the reported logic of the program seems to make it pretty hard to blackmail someone with. It appears to have been designed to cause maximum damage once, with as little warning as possible. That's the opposite of what you want with a ransom/blackmail situation.

azernik 16y ago

Big difference between this and missiles: with missiles you have to pay extra per shot. With this, you release one into the wild and from then the marginal cost to send out more copies is orders of magnitude lower than the original development cost. As for "mutations and clones" - these are computer viruses, not the organic kind. People can imitate the techniques and develop on them, but as long as copies from and to USB drives maintain their multiple-9s accuracy there won't be much spontaneous change outside of the deployer's control. Instead, the big uncertainty factor with worms and viruses has usually been emergent behavior when the infected computers network into one very large system, leading to behaviors that don't show up in small-scale tests. The way it's described, Stuxnet is inherently limited both by its transmission method - USB sticks - and by its target systems - large embedded systems, typically not network-connected, and with a very standard configuration provided from Siemens.