If it doesn't get better than that pretty quickly I'm unlikely to finish it.
In reality I think it's kind of an embarrassment how much CNE technology goes the other way, from industry and research to the IC. Not for moral reasons (though: I would have ethical problems selling bugs to attackers of any sort and am thankful I don't produce the kinds of bugs that have this market) so much as "it's not that hard to do this work and we should be getting more for our tax dollars".
Stuxnet is close to a work of art; the degree of effort involved in hiding self-reinstalling malware inside hard-drive firmware is staggering.[0] Anyone who's ever tried to write Linux drivers for undocumented hardware can appreciate how insane it is that they managed to do it for a dozen different hard drive manufacturers.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2015/2/16/8048243/nsa-hard-drive-fi...
But yes, making it work for a bunch of manufacturers would be a lot of additional work (though easier if you can obtain the data sheets for the embedded microcontroller, which is probably doable if you're the NSA).
Side note: don't blame me for the URL, it was just the first place I found that had a PDF of the paper.
"So what is spoken in the Bronx, Mexico City and Madrid? Castilian, which is Spanish, is what’s spoken, it’s spoken in those places. So you can erase that American prejudice from your mind if you ever had it. It is true — I mean, I had a colleague at Cornell, a very distinguished American medievalist who would ask me, “In what language do you write your scholarship, Roberto?” I said, “What do you mean? In English and Spanish.” He was worried that if I didn’t write in English being in Latin America, I didn’t have a language of culture in which I could write, because he didn’t think that in Latin America we had a language of culture. It is an American prejudice."
https://oyc.yale.edu/spanish-and-portuguese/span-300/lecture...
- Author believes (or is at least attempting to make others believe that she believes) that the NSA is benevolent and not committed to any specific domestic program
- Author frequently stated that 0-day purchasing platforms should not exist as it is a matter of opaque moral policy.
- Author frequently states that contractors like Immunity are problematic because they sell tradecraft to "bad nations" for profit.
- Worth noting that the author is also a NYT contributor and clings to a lot of those same notions.
The overall sentiment of the author after her webinar was that she was egotistically confined to believing in US supremacy and very much in the midst of an ideological war against competing beliefs. Probably not going to get far in her book either in light of that webinar.
No one knows who the Shadow Brokers are, unless that’s covered later in the book.