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Comment by Tycho | Hacker News Reader

It said the registry key Stuxnet plants to indicate whether a system is already infected has the value 19790509. Then it said an Iranian Jewish business man was executed on that date for spying. Also the home directory where the virus was originally compiled was called Myrtus. Which may contain another clue...

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I'm not really buying this. You're making a lot of assumptions. That Iran is the target, that the number is a date, that the date refers to that particular event, etc.

The link between the word "Myrtus" and the Old Testament seems really strained. It's the name of a plant. It features prominently in Greek mythology -- maybe the Greeks did it?

I don't think the link between old testament and myrtus is strained.

1) Eshter's born name is Hadassah, which means myrtle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther#Origin_and_meaning)

2) When Eshter asked the king if Jews can kill their enemies, king granted the permission (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=esther%208:11-8:...)

Esther was also married to a Persian King.

I also vote for a plant, as the second mentioned name is Guava and there is

"The Chilean Guava (Ugni molinae, also called Myrtus ugni or Eugenia ugni)"

see: http://www.strangewonderfulthings.com/206.htm

Good point. It could well be that the files are named after plants the same way some people name their servers after colors or smurfs or whatever.

In fact all Guavas are members of the Myrtle family.

He doesn't seem to make any assumptions to me. He states the known facts about it, that's all.

Chances are that if you pick a date at random, there will be some heinous crime that the Iranian regime has committed on that day. As to myrtus. Even if we assume that whoever did this knew that myrtus=hadas, very few Israelis who aren't biblical scholars would associate the name Hadas with queen Esther.

I would say that if this is the best we have, then it's pretty certain it's not the Israelis who did this.

Clues can be faked too.

Hm, this is no fun scavenger hunt for hackers. It's serious.

On the other hand, if you solve the puzzle, maybe you can sell your story to Hollywood.

Btw couldn't 19790509 also be 5th Sep 1979 instead of 9th May?

To the best of my knowledge, no. One of the reasons for the ISO date standard being YYYY-MM-DD is that there is no country in which the interpretation of a date given that way is at all ambiguous.

There are countries with DD-MM-YYYY or MM-DD-YYYY, so you really do have to put the year first to avoid ambiguity. However the 79 in 1979 cannot be a month or a day.

Oh it can't? Right. Like hey, let me salt a clue here. Oops, better make sure it's ISO compliant. I want to get hired later, after all...

Subtlety, obfuscation, and misdirection; welcome to the Middle East.

I agree with what you meant to say, but I don't approve of how you said it.

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