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The complaining is simply that the authors did not hide the payload. Consensus seems to be that it would have bought them an additional few months. However, the
by psyklic 16y ago
The complaining is simply that the authors did not hide the payload. Consensus seems to be that it would have bought them an additional few months. However, the virus worked and hiding the payload would have added to its complexity. So, kudos to its authors.
- tptacek 16y agoHuh? What consensus are you talking about? The techniques Nate brought up --- techniques that are in a book that (while good) you can buy at Barnes and Noble --- would have made brute-force recovery of the payload infeasible; within reach only of organizations that had a full "stack" of "centrifuge"† equipment in the Natanz† configuration, and certainly out of Symantec's reach. † If that's really the "target"
- updog 16y agoYou keep forgetting that the points that Nate brought up are completely irrelevant. The goal was not to hide from Symantec a year after the fact. The goal was to ruin Iran's nuclear plant. And that is what they did. In fact, many modern military strategies involve intentionally demonstrating your capabilities. There are good reasons to do that. It seems silly that there is this debate going on about advanced code obfuscation that absolutely no one involved cares about. "Security experts" really need to learn when not to give their 2 cents. I think anyone that has actually shipped complex software would agree, adding stuff like that is seriously not worth the risk. If you jeopardize a mission like that by inserting what amounts to intellectual masturbation just so that irrelevant bloggers can praise your technique, you definitely aren't the person for the job.