Seriously, this is dumb. I understand that you took offense to likening Stuxnet to WC, And yes, NK/RU made a much bigger mess than US/IL, but it’s all malware to those of us outside of the great game. I have the same opinion of the Stuxnet authors as I do with the wannacry authors, they are Malware dev scum.
So you don’t actually have anything intelligent to say on this topic?
> but it’s all malware to those of us outside of the great game
That’s hardly true, is it? Stuxnet didn’t even exist for those “not in the game”, whereas Wannacry and NotPetya indiscriminately destroyed the files of those people.
If you weren’t in the game, Stuxnet was just a news story and at most yet another vague alert from your antivirus.
The people behind Stuxnet, Flame, Duqu and Gauss should be praised for pushing the envelope on responsible cyberwarfare. Years later, researchers still haven’t been able to decrypt some of their modules as the targeting is just so specific.
RESPONSIBLE!!!! That word. It’s such a shibboleth.
We should never celebrate the tools of war. We should not praise those that pushed the envelope us further into cyberwarfare. Cyberwar is bad, mkay.
The very fact they were discovered, are being analyzed today, and started a global normalization of deviance with respect to fucking each other’s cybers up is a failure in my opinion.
Do you believe that the alternative of letting the Israelis bomb Iranian nuclear facilities would have been better? That’s what they would have done if not for Stuxnet.
Let me explain, I think we are arguing very different things. I am making a technical distinction about writing code, in that once you turn a tool of art into something less discriminate like a worm, or hide malicious and obfuscated code one crosses the line to doing active harm against your mission, whatever that is. I am not making any geopolitical statement or position on the outcome or actions beyond that which I consider a technical foul play to hurt others with software, malicious software, malicious intent. There are surely more elegant tools to wield.
Unfortunately I think this is a rather naive idealistic view. Software doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it very much exists in the middle of everything in the real world.
Stuxnet is malware, sure. But what about the software Iranians were using to develop nuclear weapons? Surely that must be even worse?
