According to SecureWorks, there are some similarities in code and function between Duqu and Stuxnet, but there's . "Supporting evidence is circumstantial at best and insufficient to confirm a direct relationship," SecureWorks said.

The Duqu Trojan was discovered earlier this month by a little-known Hungarian lab called the Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security. In a report last week, Symantec called the Trojan a and said that Duqu shared a lot of its source code with Stuxnet and was likely created by the same authors.

Unlike Stuxnet, Duqu is not directly targeted at industrial control systems, Symantec noted. Its main purpose is to let attackers steal data from manufacturers of industrial control systems that can then be used to craft attacks against entities using such systems.

But Jon Ramsey, CTO at Dell SecureWorks, said that any link between Duqu and Stuxnet appears tenuous at best.

Both Duqu and Stuxnet are sophisticated pieces of malware featuring multiple components. All of the supposed similarities between the two exist in just one of those components, Ramsey said.