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Sometimes when hackers break into a system or network, they will actually stop and PATCH the systems, to prevent others from using the same vulnerabilities or o
by Theory5 6y ago
Sometimes when hackers break into a system or network, they will actually stop and PATCH the systems, to prevent others from using the same vulnerabilities or other vulnerabilities from compromising the device they now own.
Suffice to say, these attackers will already have ensured they maintain persistence even with closing their initial entry points.
Likewise, the NSA has many avenues to get into a device, or (more practically, when it concerns most of the public instead of specific users and devices they need access too) they use mechanisms that aren't affected.
As they've proven, they have a huge catalog of malware and similar, but that's for actual targets. People they already believe to be threats or targets, that they need to directly attack.
But for the majority of the public? The information will come from the companies themselves, not the user devices. Why would you spend thousands or millions on developing and maintaining an application you can put on everyone's devices, and may be removed, or even just disabled due to an upgrade (until you can patch it) when you can find and obtain data from a company that already has common apps on a device, across the public, and the public not only knows they are there, they WANT the app and will take steps to complain if access is rejected? And the companies will gather as much as they legally can (and sometimes more), put it into databases, sort it, categorize it, etc?
Why would you duplicate ALL of that, when you can just take the finished product, the sorted data that's stored, either legally and knowingly, or unknowingly from a company?
And you ensure that while you can maintain that access, either to the company or the device, you direct the users and company on how to protect themselves from random attacks, or other entities that want to target the users, often with automated software that hits the "low hanging fruit".