I personally believe this is a honeypot or trial of sorts. The reason could've been to determine whether or not the intrusion was detected at all as a sort of v

I personally believe this is a honeypot or trial of sorts. The reason could've been to determine whether or not the intrusion was detected at all as a sort of validation of just how "almost invisible" the malware is, or it could've been to determine the time required to detect. Alternatively, it could be a way of getting at the company's data or even to instigate a thorough review of their platform from the client's perspective. There's a lot of subtle information in the Kaspersky report that might be interesting to intelligence services: - Simultaneous Duqu & Equation Group infection of one victim - Feature coverage (and those omitted, like other payloads) - Red herrings detected/ignored; strings, faked compile timestamps - Noticed misspelling of "Excceeded" & lack of other linguistic errors Kaspersky mulled this issue: "So the targeting of security companies indicates that either they are very confident they won't get caught, or perhaps they don't care much if they are discovered and exposed. By targeting Kaspersky Lab, the Duqu attackers have probably taken a huge bet hoping they’d remain undiscovered; and lost." However they also conceded that they aren't sure: "The exact reason why Kaspersky Lab was targeted is still not clear – although the attackers did seem to focus on obtaining information about Kaspersky's future technologies, Secure OS, anti-APT solutions, KSN and APT research." https://securelist.com/files/2015/06/The_Mystery_of_Duqu_2_0_a_sophisticated_cyberespionage_actor_returns.pdf https://securelist.com/files/2015/06/The_Mystery_of_Duqu_2_0...