908
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
908 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
59092 readers
6622 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
/tinfoilhat
I admittedly stopped reading halfway through but I feel like these newest vulnerabilities being discovered are probably just fucking government back doors the manufacturers have been forced to include.
/tinfoilhat
I can't comment on the general trend, but this specific one seems a bit too circumstantial to be of use for a serious spying effort. You'd have to have the spyware running parallel to the apps usong passwords you want to steal in a specific way.
The risk exists, which is bad enough for stochastic reasons (eventually, someone will get lucky and manage to grab something sensitive, and since the potential damage from that is incalculable, the impact axis alone drives this into firm "you need to get that fix out asap), but probably irrelevant in terms of consistency, which would be what you'd need to actually monitor anyone.
If you manage to grab enough info to crack some financial access data, you can steal money. If you can take over some legit online account or obtain some email-password combo, you can sell it. But if you want to monitor what people are doing in otherwise private systems, you need some way to either check on demand or log their actions and periodically send them to your server.
It would be far more reliable to have injection backdoors to allow you access by virtue of forcing a credential check to come up valid than to hope for the lucky grab of credentials the user might change at an arbitrary moment in time.
Check out the documentary Zero Days (2016) if you haven’t already. That’s not really a tinfoil hat take these days IMO.
Just means they have to intentionally create new ones to be eventually found for the next generation.
On the plus side now we can steal the info from the criminal's computers. The cycle of internet life...