Re:5G: The outsourced elephant in the room
by goodpoint on Saturday April 17, 2021 @01:07PM
(#26845766)
Plenty of evidence proves that intelligent services:
- Buy exploits on the market, with the US govt being the biggest buyer.
- Buy data off legitimate advertising and intelligence companies
- Hire people to find bugdoors
- Hire people to infiltrate all sorts of companies and extract information or plant bugdoors
- Convince or coerce companies to plant bugdoors in their own products
- Do the hacking themselves, plant hardware backdoors and so on
Unsurprisingly, they use all available methods.
Re:5G: The outsourced elephant in the room
by cratermoon on Saturday April 17, 2021 @01:35PM
(#26845940)
OK, I should not have said never, but when the option is between "we could hack this but if we get caught it would be an international diplomatic incident" and "hey there's a broker over here with the data for sale", the do buy it.
Which is why the intelligence services never do the hacking themselves. Instead, they buy the data off the "dark web", from the hackers whole stole and the information brokers who trade in it. If they have to do that, that is. In the US at least, agencies can just buy data on the open market. Supposedly "anonymized", but I'm pretty sure everyone reading this knows that protection is flimsy.