Bradley, hash-and-decrypt, Gauss ... a brief history of armored malware and malicious crypto

What was really stunning about Stuxnet and its cousins was it was "open source". Once the sample was captured, it was big to analyze, but none of its embedded secrets could escape a malware analyst. And it had many secrets! From an engineering point of view, the architecture and design are clean and efficient, which makes Stuxnet a good example to learn how to design malware. From an intelligence point of view, knowing what is targeted is valuable. For a money point of view, considering how governments are racing to buy 0 days, Stuxnet was above expensive. And all this was wasted because the payload was unprotected!

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