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Comment by Achshar | Hacker News Reader

I think it makes sense that a well funded government was behind flame, but it makes me wonder, there is nothing that explicitly calls for huge funding. Nothing is very costly other than talent. So just a hypothetical situation here but why can't a hypothetical real life Tony Stark make it? (not rich like Stark but intelligent like Stark) Just a one or two people in a garage on their PC. What makes it impossible for that to be the case?

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It's also the timing. The assumption is that since this is a novel attack and apparently not based on Marc Stevens' attack which was published in 2009, that it therefore was likely developed prior to 2009.

Time? But besides that, I can't really think of anything. Some guy on NPR was talking about how it might be some professional developers who did this in their free time, so that would kind of make sense.

If someone is capable of doing stuff that flame is doing, he/she might as well do it in 2 months time. The thing is we are unaware of the exact capabilities of the author of the code, so it can be a very intelligent person doing it in a few weeks or a group of smart people doing in a few years.

But the problem with later is that the more people know about it and the longer it takes to make such malware, the higher are the chances of a pre release leak, or some double agent doing his work. So one or two very intelligent people doing it in very small time make more practical sense for a covert mission.

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