Kim Zetter, writing at Wired:

The researchers don’t know if the attackers used the bank component in Gauss simply to spy on account transactions, or to steal money from targets. But given that the malware was almost certainly created by nation-state actors, its goal is likely not to steal for economic gain, but rather for counterintelligence purposes.

It’s worth thinking about: state-sponsored cyberespionage has been around for a while, but modern advancements in malware are giving such snooping tools a new level of automation and scale.

PS: I’m going to keep an eye on this story with the hopes that Kaspersky, the Russia-based security lab researching Gauss, eventually cracks the encryption on the mysterious payload.