Stuxnet was assembled from a standard implant framework that is shared across "Five Eyes" countries. Everyone writes modules of various types that implement a standard API and share them across teams. For example, if the Australians need to compromise a diplomatic machine in Singapore, the UK may have a module already written a keylogger that hooks Pinyin (software for typing in Mandarin).

When the Israeli's pushed it to 11 they brought down a ton of scrutiny on the framework as a whole. Which is why people started discovering links to other sophisticated malware families - like Kaspersky's discovery that Stuxnet and Flame used the same LNK vulnerability which was not known to the public at the time. The "QWERTY" keylogger in the Snowden leaks was identified as part of the Regin malware family.

They effectively gave every nation on the planet a trail of breadcrumbs to either find western espionage tools, or strongly attribute tools they had previously found.

This also refutes most of the articles points, they _could_ have done all these things but SOP is to do the least amount of shady shit to get the job done. Being extra cool guy just makes it more likely to trigger an anti-virus system that detects a specific trick.

I wonder if the "Olympic Games" name is in reference to a USB-stick jumping the airgap by being handed off like the Olympic Torch Relay.

That's a smart thought. Ive always wondered why they called it that.

Snowden mentioned that they have some kind of a random operation name generator that they have to use, but people keep using it over and over to find a suitable name. I don't recall the specifics but it was in his book.

> That's a smart thought. Ive always wondered why they called it that.

That's a smart-ass thought, and for that very reason would make it a horrible code name for such a project.

You want your code names to be totally arbitrary and have nothing to do with the project.

In WW2, the Brits managed to correctly guess quite a bit about the German anti-aircraft and anti-anti-aircraft systems from the 'clever' code names the Germans picked. See eg https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/bnkzdq/til_d...

Yes I know, but people take pride in their work and they want a cool name for their project.

Like I said Snowden did mention that NSA mandated the use of this code name generator in his book, and it was indeed random for this reason. But he also describes people used to game the system for a cool code name by simply running the generator over and over until they got one they liked :)

I would imagine that a cool name would also make it easier to sell a proposal to the brass. Prudence or not, people are easily influenced this way. It's why marketing works.