sophisticated tradecraft has this air of magic to it. it's subtle and it fools you, it breaks our abstraction of "this device does X" by making it do Y, exploit

sophisticated tradecraft has this air of magic to it. it's subtle and it fools you, it breaks our abstraction of "this device does X" by making it do Y, exploiting the details of the mechanism we gloss over. another example is the Pegasus spyware, which surreptitiously assembled a Turing machine out of PDF decompression logic in iMessage. or the Thing, an old Soviet bug with no electronics, just passive bits of metal that reflect and modulate an RF beam. there's probably many more examples of clever tricks that stayed secret, and are forgotten to time.