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.
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.
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.
THAT is the most sophisticated piece of software ever written? The description sounds less complicated than the was the perl3 interpreter.
I've heard the google search engine contains >10 million... no, not lines of code, source files. 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.
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.
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.
History repeats.