"On complexity vs sophistication: During the cold war, a US company noticed the USSR had stolen the plans for a natural gas pipeline system, but not the software.

In response, the US introduced an integer overflow bug that was uptime dependent, and took something like 6 months to hit. The bug simultaneously cranked up the pumps and closed all the valves in the network.

It was known that the Soviet economy would crash in under a year without the ability to cheaply move natural gas, so they couldn’t test long enough to find this.

A year or so later, the DoD’s seismographs detected the largest non-nuclear explosion in human history.

The main impact wasn’t the explosion or the short-term economic damage. The main impact was that the USSR stopped trusting stolen software, which set them way further back, economically and militarily.

Arguably, that ~one line of code was infinitely more sophisticated than stuxnet."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage