this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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Unpopular opinion: what if it was not a state actor and just some bored person somewhere that thought it would be cool to own a bot net?
What if this is just one of many backdoors and it’s just the only one we found?
I heard that person actively contributed for something like 2 years, providing actually useful contributions, to gain the level of trust needed to plant that backdoor. Feels a bit too much to chalk it up to boredom.
As for the second part, that's an interesting question. Are there lots of backdoors and we just happened to notice this one, or are backdoors very rare exactly because we'd have found them out soon like in this case?
You'd be surprised what I manage with motivation and boredom.
You'd be surprised what a highly skilled ~~scalled~~ person can manage to achieve.
Boredom, Skills and Motivation are dangerous things to have if improperly handled.
You might be on to something, it might have been the lizzard people!
Another speculation from the suse team was a private company with intent to sell the exploit to state ~~across~~ actors
I think there's lots of known backdoors that are not publicly disclosed and privately sold.
But given the history of cves in inclined to believe most come from well intentioned developers. When you read the blogs from the Google security team for example, it's interesting to see how you need to chain a couple exploits at least, to get a proper attack going. Not in this case, it would make it very straightforward to accomplish very intrusive actions.
Nobody is both that bored and that motivated. Unless paid.
You forget that a lot of brilliant open source projects are one man shows from geniuses somewhere around the world. They are usually not paid.
In the other hand, if you get your hands on a powerful botnet, you can rent out its services (like ddos for example) for quite a bit of money.
The design is Moriarty lvls of complex. State actor might be too specific, but everything but a group of people would be highly unlikely.
Realistically I think it's probably easier to acquire a botnet of less secure systems. This was a targeted attack.
Easier, yes. But some people will do stuff because it is more challenging.
Yeah, well that's just, like, your opinion, man. (You mentioned the word opinion in a post referencing The Big Lebowski. I had to. Thank you for coming to my shit post.)