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It depends what you mean by "security first". If you're a person of interest and you're carrying around a personal spy with actual data on it and a hardware con
by aboringusername 5y ago
It depends what you mean by "security first". If you're a person of interest and you're carrying around a personal spy with actual data on it and a hardware connected microphone, camera, GPS, sensors etc, which sends God knows what over the internet then yes, it's not going to go well for you.
But if you use devices with hardware kill switches and the most secure OS possible (storing nothing on device, perhaps it's a gateway to another security hardened machine).
Secure computing is possible, but it takes a lot of time, effort and dedication.
If you're just using off the shelf hardware and software you're going to have a bad time.
One thing that seems to link these Pegasus stories is that none of these targeted individuals are practising seemingly decent security ops, being hacked over WhatsApp or iMessage seems fairly trivial and hopefully now they would reconsider their threat model.
- can16358p 5y agoI think as long as secure computing isn't convenient enough for many people out there, these news will just rise in numbers. There are likely many out there secure computing, and we don't hear the news about them because they don't get hacked. But with the convenience of using smartphones and sending anything quickly over them using (insert your favorite messenger service) statistically many people will be using them, even for absurdly important/critical communication, and a small number of them will be hacked. Services like WhatsApp/iMessage will just keep adding more features to stay feasible, and more people will be using the feasible services, with more features creating new attack surfaces inevitably.