This is too much like when John McAfee et al ranted about how the Michelangelo virus was turning the antivirus world upside down because of it's ultra sophistication.<p>What they weren't saying though, was that Michelangelo was a STONED virus clone with the "Your PC is now Stoned!!!" printing payload turned into simple disk overwriting procedure (very common at the time), and the trigger was changed to a particular date instead of a random once-a-week average odds. It's worth noting there were already at least a dozen STONED variants by the time MICH showed up on the scene. All of them were simple opcode changes just to evade the existing scan strings. Not sophisticated.<p>In other words, Michelangelo wasn't the sophisticated world altering virus the antivirus folks were ranting about at all. And while the trigger date was about a birthday, it wasn't chosen because it was also Michelangelo's birthday or whatever. It was hugely marketable for the antivirus companies when promoted as such, though.<p>History repeats.
<i>THAT</i> is the most sophisticated piece of software ever written? The description sounds less complicated than the was the perl3 interpreter.<p>I've heard the google search engine contains >10 million... no, not lines of code, <i>source files</i>. That might be the actual most sophisticated piece of software. Perhaps?
There were reports that Stuxnet spuriously affected Siemens controllers in countries all around the world. That smacks of over-simplicity, not sophistication.