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Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

>With the hacking capabilities of government and organisations, would planting incriminating material on somebody's computer be trivial?

I do believe so. Twenty years ago as an curious teen it was easy for me to penetrate various systems and to dox people. Now the security is better but also the attack vectors and tools evolved.

If we aren't talking about oranizations with good security practices or paranoid individuals, it won't take a large organization to break in a target. A good prepared hacker could do it. Maybe not in a few hours or days, but in some time it is doable if that person is sufficiently knowledgeable and determined.

But we have to ask what for? Nobody is going to hack your personal system without having nothing to gain. And even if he has something to gain, the prior condition is for him to know this.

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> But we have to ask what for?

Journalists and political activists were always targets of violence

I can foresee one answer to the question 'why would someone do this?'. It's called a potent cocktail of vengeance and self-destruction. People who self-medicate through harming others are always looking for a way to escalate. Look up the story of UGNazi, and don't skip the ending.

Well, I am one of the many people who theoretically can hack someone's system while not leaving evidences of it, at least not evidences pointing to myself.

I do have people I dislike, and yet I don't hack in their systems to plant false evidences.

Some crimes are trivial to commit. Walking away unscathed from committing the crime is far harder than one might think. Consequences are inevitable, one way or another.

While I am sure you are competent like most folks on here, I will say this: I have met a good number of people who claim they can "get in and get out un-noticed". In retrospect, I think rarely did they consider the possibilities of observation beyond the actual target system.

My point is this: There is no defense against 0-day/X-day exploits in the wild. But the second best thing against being patched is logging and properly tuned alerting. In my 20-ish years of working in this field I've caught half a dozen attackers/intruders via logs and anomaly alerts. Without those 2nd best things in place the entire network(s) would probably have been compromised.

Cheers.

If you want to get back at someone, you could just punch them in the face or kick them in the nuts. We live in a world where simple assault results in less serious consequences than hacking.

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