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> I tend to expect private individuals to seek targets with a higher expected value. If you're a very skilled and dedicated hacker, what other targets do you h
by fl7305 3y ago
> I tend to expect private individuals to seek targets with a higher expected value.
If you're a very skilled and dedicated hacker, what other targets do you have that can net you many millions of dollars?
> or an individual with a motive other than profit
Isn't one of the most striking things about the hacker community the extreme amounts of time and effort that are put into things that are not expected to generate any profit?
I mean, there are people who spend all their free time over several decades just digging tunnels under their property. Or build a 6502 CPU from discrete transistors. Etc.
- lolinder 3y ago> Isn't one of the most striking things about the hacker community the extreme amounts of time and effort that are put into things that are not expected to generate any profit? You're conflating the hacker-as-in-threat-actor community with the hacker-as-in-Linux-maintainer community.
- fl7305 3y agoSure, generally speaking, people who try to break into computer systems for profit do not have a lot of overlap with people who spends lots of time writing open source software for fun. But in this case it is not hard to imagine that the XZ-perpetrator came from the second group, right? Edit: I mean, this wouldn't be that different from when Ken Thompson demonstrated how to do a hidden backdoor in the C compiler?