Oats and Iron

2020:

The Flame espionage malware that infected computers in Iran achieved mathematic breakthroughs that could only have been accomplished by world-class cryptographers.

“It’s not a garden-variety collision attack, or just an implementation of previous MD5 collisions papers—which would be difficult enough,” said Matthew Green, a professor at Johns Hopkins University. “There were mathematicians doing new science to make Flame work.”