Re:Ask HN: How would French police locate suspects by tappin...
by solardev on Saturday November 04, 2023 @03:45PM
(#38144456)
If you discover a zero day in a major operating system, you can sell it and become rich overnight.
Or you can play the public hero and end up best buddies with Snowden and exiled from every Western country. The governments don't particularly like whistle blowers.
And if you found a backdoor, you probably wouldn't want to use it on every device all at once and reveal its existence. Somebody somewhere will log it. But if you carefully pick and choose your targets, just a few in a million (or several billion), it might not be detected for a long time.
White hack groups like Project Zero routinely find these exploits. That doesn't necessarily mean they're planted, it just means that it's definitely possible to hide them from common view, and it takes a lot of skill and dedication to uncover that, then also a strong enough corporate shield to protect you from any possible fallout.
Unlike taking pictures of UFOs, it's not just being in the right place at the right time. It takes a very high level of skill that the general population doesn't have.
Or you can play the public hero and end up best buddies with Snowden and exiled from every Western country. The governments don't particularly like whistle blowers.
And if you found a backdoor, you probably wouldn't want to use it on every device all at once and reveal its existence. Somebody somewhere will log it. But if you carefully pick and choose your targets, just a few in a million (or several billion), it might not be detected for a long time.
White hack groups like Project Zero routinely find these exploits. That doesn't necessarily mean they're planted, it just means that it's definitely possible to hide them from common view, and it takes a lot of skill and dedication to uncover that, then also a strong enough corporate shield to protect you from any possible fallout.
Unlike taking pictures of UFOs, it's not just being in the right place at the right time. It takes a very high level of skill that the general population doesn't have.