Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

What about patching the vulnerabilities rather than running around with anger? We can sue the hell out of them and convince the Israeli government to ban them altogether but this is obviously doomed to repeat, somebody will inevitably take the place sooner or later, legally or illegally.

View on HN

It’s already been patched long time ago.

No one is running around with anger.

This is unprecedented and new information is coming out that shows how influential people, opposition and politicians were targeted worldwide.

Good for us if it's so. I'm just concerned about the bugs existed for long enough for the exploit to be relevant and still haunting some diplomats' phones, despite so many publications. And many people discussing legal and political (doomed to be inefficient IMHO) rather than technical solutions.

A lot of these issues will not be solvable technically, though. Given the way systems/software is built currently, vulnerabilities are going to exist and there are very highly paid and motivated people working on figuring out how to exploit them. It also does not help that mobile devices are in use for much longer than they receive security updates etc.

I am not saying that these issues can/will be solved by legal and political means (especially given that it is not restricted to a single country), but it seems rather unlikely that these issues can be solved by pure technical means at the current point.

This revelation comes from a security investigation that the Finnish government started in autumn 2021. So when the exploit was discovered, they checked to see if they were hit and hopefully too actions to protect themselves if they were.

Patching won't help, if you are diplomat, that has to use communication towers in a country, that is spying on you. Also, phone OS all allow incoming of sms, that are not visible - because that is how they are built. Those messages are there for technical reasons and that is also making them easy to exploit.

Also, Israeli government simply can't forbid their companies to do, what US companies are not forbidden to do, because that option is only available to totalitarian states.

Patching is not an issue here, but your ability to take your own(and if you are a really lucky - then others) government by balls and squeeze hard, if they do this stuff. If you do not have ability to get government by balls, then government is squeezing your balls already.

If you are a diplomat, then it's your country's job to secure communications. It's like blaming Lockheed for the government's foreign policy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com