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Comment by snark42 | Hacker News Reader

If I'm targeting an individual/organization a watering hole attack requires that I can own a site the target visits regularly.

This seems a lot more complicated than just going to any unencrypted website via network redirection of some sort. Do most people routinely visit encrypted sites that are easily hacked to target an RCE on an individual?

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While I'm not certain about the terminology and whether this would still be a watering hole attack, but any of the "Show HN" posts here, could trivially be hosted by an actor with malicious intentions.

You don't need to compromise a site they visit regularly, there are plenty of other ways to get someone to visit a malicious page, phishing email or even a link on HackerNews for example. People will visit new sites for all kinds of reasons, you'd just need to understand your target.

Also, I at least, have very little confidence that a state level actor couldn't subvert the news.ycombinator.com hosting provider if it wanted to seriously enough.

If someone were to be "secure enough" to be running drugs/guns/children - they'd _have_ to be totally disconnected from the internet and cellular networks, and probably all their first and second level associates as well.

I don't have any sympathy for those people, but sadly a journalist critical of a government has all the same problems there, and that's bad for humanity.

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