Read some hacker/cracker zines from the late 80's/early 90's (Phrack, 2600, etc being the well known ones) and you'll quickly gain a deep perspective on the pace of computing/IT security advancement over the decades. Stuxnet and Duqu will suddenly appear to be a minor revisions of 20 year old technology/techniques. You'll see code for polymorphic engines written in TurboPascal suddenly break out into obscured x86 assembler interrupt handlers. Detailed analysis of reverse engineering efforts against "packed" code on foreign and obscure architectures. And the word "cyber" used in all seriousness.
It is quite amusing to see how many old ideas from the dawn of computing have been reinvented multiple times over the years.
Not necessarily. Occam's Razor. It's more likely that they used something obscure to compile or obfuscate the code or wrote a tool to do so. Creating a new language just to write this seems highly unlikely.
Is writing something like this in pure assembly beyond the realm of possibility for some reason? There are still a few dedicated people that code on the metal for high level operating systems (Steve Gibson comes to mind immediately)
Writing something like this in assembly isn't impossible (or that difficult), but the patterns look like something that you wouldn't be using if you were writing in assembly.
My bet is that it's just C with a hand-rolled OO framework.
We have what is effectively an alien virus, given how advanced it was, its construction and spawing of duqu and being written in an unknown language.
This is serious awesome cyberpunk stuff - but scary as hell at the same time.
With the revelation of Stuxnet and Duqu, NOBODY should think anything they do/say online is safe.