While security experts know what Stuxnet is designed to do, Conficker is still the reigning mystery of the cyberworld because no one knows why it’s there or what it’s going to do. “Whoever developed it must be thinking that this was an incredible learning exercise,” says Joffe. “They were able to modify their code four times as we reacted defensively each time. They were able to step around us.” Version E of Conficker came out at the beginning of April 2009 and—alarmingly—it remains unbroken a year and a half later. “They raised the bar so high I have no idea what it’s doing,” he says. “It looks like it’s dormant.” But if he were to put himself in the Conficker controller’s shoes, he muses, “I'd be tactically selling off individual machines,” so that customers could choose their targets from a directory of hacked computers. “He could give me your computer, and we would never know it, as a security industry.”
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