NSO Group's iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender

Re:NSO Group's iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rig... by makomk on Thursday August 25, 2016 @10:44PM (#12363982)

These days, exploiting vulnerabilities in most interesting code actually seems to be quite fiddly thanks to all the mitigation techniques and requires a bunch of specialist knowledge and tools that isn't exactly trivial to come by. The knowledge is already restricted, just for commercial rather than legal reasons.

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Re:NSO Group's iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rig... by AnthonyMouse on Thursday August 25, 2016 @11:41PM (#12364116)

Which is still knowledge. If you have the information you can make the tools.

I mean obviously in reality the line between "information" and "software" is non-existent because software is just a type of information, but if you insist on trying to draw a line anyway then it still fails because it's still possible to convey everything of significance using natural language, and the skillset required to convert plain language instructions into software is not rare enough to be prohibitive.

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Re:NSO Group's iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rig... by pixl97 on Friday August 26, 2016 @09:07AM (#12365904)

>thanks to all the mitigation techniques and requires a bunch of specialist knowledge and tools that isn't exactly trivial to come by

Eh, specialist knowledge yes. Restricted, no. Getting documents on how chips and software has always been somewhat restricted, just be a linux person and try to get documentation from Broadcom on how their wifi/lan chips work, for example.

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