[FRIAM] 5 agencies compromised

[Marcus Daniels]

Nation states could also acquire or steal source codes to efficiently find the zero day exploits and hire people away from the companies that wrote the codes.   The reverse engineering could start with really good models of the target systems going in.  The first thing to do is unlevel the playing field.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2020 11:01 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] 5 agencies compromised

I think it's tiered. At the bottom, you find the Gift Card scammers. The next step up might be the password-guessers and phishers. Then comes the automatic server finders and ssh dictionary attackers. Etc. Somewhere near the top would be the cryptohackers who can execute man in the middle, network/audio/network/current sniffing, etc. But I think it takes a more sophisticated strategist to take that huge toolkit and customize "solutions".

And those "solutions engineers" require, I think, a fairly sophisticated and persistent infrastructure, implying a mid-sized corporation, data center, nation-state, etc. Although the loosely coupled guerrilla style organization presented in, say, Mr. Robot, sounds plausible, I think their capabilities would be constrained to the lower half of that tier.

On 12/17/20 10:44 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> Are we talking (cyber)Soldiers of Fortune here?   Eric Prince and and 
> his ilk surely have a whole string of guys much better at 
> first-person-shooters and cyberhacking than actual first-person 
> shooting.   I have never opened a "Soldier of Fortune" magazine, and 
> even cringe when I see them, but imagine by now there is plenty of 
> lure/candy for the guys (and gals) all over the world in their 
> parent's basements (or small cardboard box behind the large cardboard 
> box in the shanty town) lace into those rags (well, probably not 
> literally, because who in that world actually touches paper?)
>> I mean the "bad guys".  A good reason to find out who did it is so that they can be offered jobs on the this side.   Perhaps part of the high status is living an utterly lawless lifestyle -- something that would be hard to match in Europe or the United States.   Spending power of $90k in VA would be easy to match I think.   People that are really good at that would make much more, I think.

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