Also if the spyware is installed in firmware at the factory, how is Linux going to help you?

Zyxel, Asus, and other manufacturers of networking devices (with backdoors of course) are also there.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/hacke...

Devices like this are used by the government and military contractors as well, and as you can see such vulnerabilities are trivial to detect so you can't count on the opposition finding out about it and using it. This one was picked up days after the firmware release. The smoking gun would be government and military admins secretly being advised by the CIA to close these security loopholes, so the government is protected but everyone else isn't. IMHO that would get Snowdened almost immediately. There's no way they'd keep a lid on that, there would just be too many people involved.

As with a lot of this conspiracy theory stuff, it only makes sense if you don't think about it too much. Once you actually start thinking through the consequences and practicalities, it doesn't hold together.

Understatement of the year. Secret account is exactly what people call "a backdoor".

I learned about it from wikileaks. Eg https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/space_2359301.html

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3184435/wikileaks-documents-...

This is like someone claiming it will rain next week and when asked how they know, they say they can prove it rained last week. That’s irrelevant. Yes I know they have firmware attacks. Where does the claim they are putting it on machines in the factory come from? How many times do I need to ask the same question?

https://wikileaks.org/vault7/

>"NightSkies 1.2" a "beacon/loader/implant tool" for the Apple iPhone. Noteworthy is that NightSkies had reached 1.2 by 2008, and is expressly designed to be physically installed onto factory fresh iPhones. i.e the CIA has been infecting the iPhone supply chain of its targets since at least 2008.

By supply chain, when they say mail orders and other shipments, they just mean between the vendor and the customer. In this case the use of "supply chain" could be miss-understood, this is a post-factory attack which would be carried out in transit, probably at a US border.

We have seen that done before to shipments of devices such as computers and network gear that have been intercepted and hacked before delivery to a suspect, or a target organisation or country.

I don't think this can be reasonably construed as evidence for Apple conniving with the CIA. In fact I still don't think that would make any sense from a CIA perspective. The factories aren't even in the US. Apple employees aren't background checked or sworn agents, they're a potential security risk. Why involve them if you don't need to?

But breaking almost all software by default just because some incompetent users keep choosing to install malware is not a great strategy.

You're making excuses for the lack of security innovation on Linux workstations. They've fallen behind.

I am the sysadmin and owner of my machine, not Apple or some other organization. They have no business telling me what software I can and can't run, or what files that software can access.

You can't publish any software you want on the App Store.

> Beginning in macOS 10.14.5, software signed with a new Developer ID certificate and all new or updated kernel extensions must be notarized to run. Beginning in macOS 10.15, all software built after June 1, 2019, and distributed with Developer ID must be notarized

So, no. You need Apple's approval to be able to create software that can actually be ran by end-users even if you do not distribute using the App Store.

Second, notarisation is not an "approval". It is a malware scan.

The only thing that requires notarisation, which, again, is not "approval", is kernel extensions.

There are solutions that are intended to force the sandboxing by opening a new Xserver for every application, e.g. Firejail [0], but that comes with another set of interoperability problems.

Wayland was supposed to address some of these concerns, but it will only do so for applications that natively talk wayland protocol, not the ones that connect through x-protocol via xwayland

[0] https://firejail.wordpress.com/

So you might be interested in Qubes OS, which provides a very strong isolation through virtualization.

> A Wayland compositor usually spawns only one Xwayland instance. This is because many X11 applications assume they can communicate with other X11 applications through the X server, and this requires a shared X server instance. This also means that Xwayland does not protect nor isolate X11 clients from each other, unless the Wayland compositor specifically chooses to break the X11 client intercommunications by spawning application specific Xwayland instances. X11 clients are naturally isolated from Wayland clients.

I use QubesOS, but it comes with its own set of problems as well.

[0] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html

That includes any systems you might have SSHed into with X forwarding enabled, as it automatically extends the trust there. Yes, your ssh client might try to enable X SECURITY extension (which clamps acesss to just the current window), but it is disabled by default or bypassed anyway by the users as that extension is known to crash quite a few programs.

Both are a product of their time when the prevailing approach was to trust the programs you run.