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This is very poor advice. “If the FBI is in your box you’re already dead.” No, in this case, they are fixing a hack. I don’t want them touching my stuff, but th
by imwillofficial 6y ago
This is very poor advice.
“If the FBI is in your box you’re already dead.”
No, in this case, they are fixing a hack. I don’t want them touching my stuff, but that’s hardly “dead”.
“Cheaper to buy a new box”
Reinstalling and reconfiguring is always cheaper than buying new and reconfiguring.
This reasoning is very poor, why did you feel the need to make this comment?
- high_byte 6y agolol "rm shell.js or if that's too bothersome buy a new machine"
- bena 6y agoI don't think he means that because it's the FBI. I think he means that since the FBI is using the vulnerability itself to patch affected systems that you've already been compromised if the FBI is able to do this to your system.
- imwillofficial 6y agoBut buy a new machine?
- bena 6y agoIt's a sticky wicket. A compromised machine is just that, compromised. Someone recently posted a story about an exploit wherein the compiler itself was compromised to compromise a particular set of programs when compiling those programs. Including the compiler itself. So closing this particular door does not mean that they didn't use their access to establish other doors. Or self-opening doors. Or any number of things. And you have no clue as to how far down it goes. This exploit could have compromised the boot loader or something. The only way to be completely sure is to essentially strip the machine to bare metal and audit every piece of software on it. The safest thing to do, if you want to be completely sure, is to buy a new machine. And even then, you're trusting that the machine you bought hasn't been compromised by the manufacturer or something like that. But it's a known-ish quantity. But that's a "nuke it from orbit" kind of option. Often, being completely sure isn't necessary. We can live with reasonably sure.