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A comment on The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software ever written. Parent comment

Re:The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software e... by bluGill on Friday May 18, 2018 @02:44PM (#17103907)
$100K for a bomb? I have no idea what bombs really cost, but if we go with that number, they could have dropped a lot of bombs for that price. One junior engineer working for a year costs that much. We know that expertise in a lot of fields existed, that implies a number of engineers.

I'm going to guess a bomb is cheaper. Of course a bomb has a lot of other disadvantages which is why it wasn't used.

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Re:The Stuxnet worm may be the most sophisticated software e... by indiv0 on Friday May 18, 2018 @03:05PM (#17104074)
One particularly expensive component of stuxnet is deniability. Although the commonly accepted theory for stuxnet's invention is "a state actor", specifically the United States, there's no proof of that at all. And conjecture without proof poses no threat to the US government.

If the government were to, on the otherhand, bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, one small mistake in the plan could ruin their chances of deniability, bringing down international condemnation on the US.

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