I will suggest another alternative. The authors weighed the risk of not being successful vs the risk of someone analyzing the worm. The latter was inevitable b

I will suggest another alternative. The authors weighed the risk of not being successful vs the risk of someone analyzing the worm. The latter was inevitable but the former would have been disastrous. Those protections would have only slowed down malware analysts. If this was normal malware that would be the goal, exist for as long as possible without being detected. ‘Normal’ malware has a high tolerance for failure. In this case the goal appears to be ‘break some sensitive equipment before a particular deadline hits’, with a razor thin margin for error. But your points are not lost, good post.