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Comment by ren_engineer | Hacker News Reader

Apple is basically admitting their system is vulnerable to abuse but wishing/praying/hoping that people won't abuse it. Optimism isn't a security measure. This is like leaving your production database with default credentials and saying it's OK because people will do the right thing and follow the rules.

seems like it almost confirms this system was created to make it easy to ruin people's lives, because you know plenty of bad actors will take advantage of this

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I read all the pitfalls of this and am convinced it's a bad idea, but what do you mean about people using it to ruin people's lives? How would someone misuse it in this way?

Imagine one of these no-click zero-day iMessage exploits, but instead of taking over your phone it opens a share link and adds a gallery of illegal photos to your own device or cloud storage.

They not going to go through Apple if they planted CP on your device, they going to take you to custody saying they got an anonymous tip or something along this line or just tip off the police to do the job for them because it worked in the past, requires less effort and maybe I'm wrong on this but there is no additional gain from going though all the hops when you can do it with an anonymous call.

Also, if you have full access to somebody's phone, it does not matter if Apple is scanning for CP or not, you can do much more sophisticated things.

Also 0-day non click exploits are not something random scriptkiddies running around with dropping CP on random phones as they are way too valuable.

Certainly, twitch pranksters and 4chan trolls have shown its practically frictionless to SWAT someone and get the cops to raid their house, much easier than any convoluted hacking exercise engineered by a hollywood script writer.

> there is no additional gain from going though all the hops

The only thing I could see would be getting the victim locked out of their iCloud etc accounts with little/no immediate recourse, as from what I have read the process seems to be to lock their accounts as the CP detection alert is sent to law enforcement.

> Also 0-day non click exploits are not something random scriptkiddies running around with dropping CP on random phones as they are way too valuable.

I agree, 0-days are the far high end and wouldn't be used for things like this especially by trolls, but I have to imagine there are methods in the lower-hanging fruit levels available to malcontents to sneak content like this onto unsuspecting users devices. Like, custom ringtone/emoji apps and download packs, random QR codes that lead to downloading a place's menu but also a suspect image, or other usual suspects.

This could be done with iCloud today, given they already scan server side. Both cases require getting a user to save photos to an iCloud syncing location to trigger the scan.

Nobody has put down a convincing difference for this attack yet, but people sure do love repeating it.

Annoying political opponent? Pay some israeli cyberwarfare corporation to compromise their phone and plant CSAM. Problem solved.

If you can compromise their phone, so may other terrible things you could also do easily without having to involve CSAM.

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