It seems as though you can basically do anything in this administration if the money is right, so selling state secrets free of punishment sounds about right to me.
To me, it's just another example of what the poor and marginalized in this country have known for generations, finally catching up to the comfortable class. It's easier to count the institutions that AREN'T pay-to-play, especially those associated with the law and courts.
Know what's fun? Facing down a trained attorney as a pro se litigant in small claims court. Want to beat the 70-90% loss rate for pro se litigants in a forum that was originally designed specifically for pro se litigants? Hire a lawyer, lol.
Small claims, true to the name, is the lowest of low stakes. It's downhill from there.
It has been for decades now, they are just open and blatant now because the corruption is so deep rooted that there is little average people can do except choose to burn down the house around themselves.
This administration has taken it to a whole new level -- basically an organized crime syndicate.
The system has always been corrupt in that the rich write the rules but this is pure kleptocracy. Remember that Nixon was told by his own party that his conduct was unacceptable and they would not support him...
Nixon also got pardoned and faced no real repercussions for his actions other than leaving. Again, I very much believe we have been this corrupt for many decades, it is only the visibility of the corruption that has changed. What few actions against corruption we have seen was just good PR work, as evident by its lack of teeth in sentencing and complete lack of any enforcement or investigation against anyone with money or political power.
I think that it's wholly incorrect to argue it has not gotten worse. The government has always been corrupt, true. They have gotten far more open and brazen about it, true. But they are also far more grotesquely corrupt in outright disgusting ways, which is different. No other president has just gifted themselves billions of dollars of taxpayer money. No other president has bulldozed the whitehouse for open ended self gratification projects on the scale Trump as. No other president has openly run family-centric money laundering schemes of this magnitude, or openly accepted foreign bribes, etc etc etc.
It was always corrupt but my word, you can't say that it's the same corruption just more exposed.
Hierarchies can punish this. Note that the legislature and judicial branches exert their power. Epstein files got released if you need proof.
(However, if we are International Systems Realists, there are inevitable effects that happen. I have a feeling even Biden/Harris would be in Iran right now.)
Some got released, and in the way the Executive wanted them to be.
This proves the opposite IMO - while the Legislative is co-opted, the Judicial branch has shown it is quite inadequate exerting control or punishment of the Executive.
> Google also notes that Coruna checks if an iOS devices has Apple's most stringent security setting, known as Lockdown Mode, enabled, and doesn’t attempt to hack it if so.
Many components of Coruna have never been seen before, he points out, and the whole toolkit appears to have been created by a “single author,” as he puts it.
I wonder who wrote it. Must be someone really good at it. Someone who might never give a talk in a conference.
> Google notes that Apple patched vulnerabilities used by Coruna in the latest versions of its mobile operating system, iOS 26, so its exploitation techniques are only confirmed to work against iOS 13 through 17.2.1.
He keeps changing his mind every day and keeps talking bullshit. At this point the trashy drug dealer trying to sell to school kids is more reputable than the USA
Whenever I point out that Apple's "security by obscurity" strategy is a complete failure I get downvotes.
Person suspecting their iPhone has been hacked has no way to check it. Apple only offer cope mechanism in form of "lockdown mode", which likely can be bypassed just as well.
This situation shows that Apple devices are not secure and liability.
They'll likely protect your grandma from getting low effort malware, but if you are a CEO - buy something else.
The Google threat analysis report doesn't say anything about USG involvement; that it was found on compromised Ukrainian sites, has code written in "native English", but also signs of LLM authorship. The Google report says the kit they found can't compromise current iOS, which is a capability you'd assume USG would have --- though it's important remember that "USG" comprises dozens of different buyers each with different toolchains.
Maybe this was the Fisheries Department exploit toolkit.
iVerify, which spun out of Trail of Bits and presumably knows what they're talking about, says it bears "hallmarks" of being connected to USG CNE work. I believe it. But the USG is on net a buyer, not a producer, of CNE tooling. Whatever a given service agency or IC arm buys, dozens of other aligned countries are also buying.
(And, of course, the non-aligned countries have their own commercial supply chains).
I don't think the ancient nature of the exploit chain has much bearing on the origin. I think it points away from the actual 2025 campaigns being USG-attached, but I don't think anyone was suggesting that to start with - the Google report makes it pretty clear that they believe the same code was resold to several parties, either in parallel or sequentially, around this time frame.
I think the notion here is that either:
* There's a shared upstream origin or author between this toolkit and the Operation Triangulation toolkit ahead of the use in Operation Triangulation (ie - someone sold this chain to both the Operation Triangulation authors and a third party). I actually think that the uses of specifically structured code-names internally and the overall structure of the codebase described in the Google writeup make this theory less likely; building an exploit toolkit while using these practices to cosplay as a US-government affiliated engineer would be clever and fun, but it's not something we've really seen before.
* This toolkit originated from (whether it was leaked, compromised, or resold) the same actor who was responsible for Operation Triangulation.
Right, I agree with you; my thing is mostly just differentiating between CNE enablement packages the USG itself creates vs CNE enablement packages that are on offer to every USG-aligned country, of which there are a bunch.
How could something as sensitive get out of an administration as competent as the current one? At least they have no access to lets say AI or autonomous weapons and the tools of mass surveillance ...
I guess the technical side is for the bots to find holes in my argument. Anyone with a brain in tech that knows of the US and it's invasion into privacy knows that the US having an iOS "Hacking Toolkit" is nightmare fuel.
I already assumed it did, just glad Wired put it down on paper for the rest of us.
Writing an article that "it's escaped the hands of the US government and into the hands of foreign hands" doesn't change my opinion of the abuse of power.
Citation: Edward Snowden - Present Day (Flock, etc)
I think the downvotes come from the friction of the language used and the lack of sources to back the claim. If you linked some stories, it would add some weight to the statement.
How many people on this site are unaware of the amount of times the government's courts have found its executive, legislative, (and lower judicial) branches acting without authority?
How many people on this site are unaware of the extent to which we are monitored? And openly? We have an entire agency whose primary task is to mass surveil.
I think all the things are true at the same time... that most people already believe it, they don't need sources in this instance, but they still don't like the way the comment was worded.
Unfortunately, I think that's likely the case for anyone on the younger side. Most of that came to light in 2013, 13 years ago. Anyone 20-30 years old today would've been a teenager then in high school, and likely not paying attention very closely.
It was big news for a little bit, and then the media by design quickly forgot about it barely a year later, and that is why history is doomed to repeat.
I'm very concerned about bugdoors and very grateful to Snowden, but I don't remember a specific example of a software bugdoor that was disclosed there or identified as such as a result of his revelations. Do you have an example? I don't think the Dual-EC DRBG counts here.
No, anyone who remembers the Best Buy/FBI debacle knows that this statement is very well-grounded in reality. If you took your laptop to Best Buy for repairs, the FBI got a copy of your hard drive contents.
Nowhere in that entire case does anyone allege that the FBI was regularly being sent entire copies of the hard drive contents of best buy customers.
The FBI merely taught workers how to identify and report CSAM. There is nothing illegal about that.
EFF only sued because their FOIA request for info about their training process was denied, and after the FBI argued why they shouldn't grant the request, EFF agreed and backed down.
Not only did the EFF agree to dismiss the case, their blog post claim of a supposed Fourth Amendment violation was never even argued in any of their filings at all.
In my opinion, to construe a simple disagreement/misunderstanding over a FOIA request denial (which was proven as legal and justified) as "If you took your laptop to Best Buy for repairs, the FBI got a copy of your hard drive contents"... is patently and demonstrably false, and does not make any sense whatsoever.
> In total, Coruna takes advantage of 23 distinct vulnerabilities in iOS, a rare collection of hacking components that suggests it was created by a well-resourced, likely state-sponsored group of hackers.
People have been hacking iOS since before it was called iOS and they weren't necessarily "well-resourced, likely state-sponsored". See geohot
No matter the risk, I must carry my smartphone everywhere and install every app. It would be unimaginable to have the urge to look something up, but then wait to do it later until I'm using a real computer. No negative outcome will EVER shake my deep, permanent need to carry a smartphone all the time and use it for as much as possible.
A VPN won't help you if your device is compromised. A VPN won't help you if the server is compromised. A VPN won't help you if the VPN is compromised.
I really wish people would understand that VPNs are not magical, unbreakable security. VPNs are barely security at all, and commercial VPNs even less so.
Ironically, the exploits in this leaked kit all involved flaws in webkit, so you'd have been safer sticking to native apps assuming they didn't have any webviews in them to load the malicious site.
