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Comment by toasterblender | Hacker News Reader

> But while they could try and poach them today, tomorrow there will be a whole load of new people working for those companies, and it'll just be a never-ending cycle.

The number of people who successfully find 0-click 0-days for iOS/Android is very small. It's not a vastly replenishable resource.

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It's a small group but a wide pool. It's not like the same person finds 10 0days. And until they do find their one exploit most of them have pretty much no credentials at all. So how do you avoid hiring 10,000 up and comers that never actually come up?

The same that it works in any other industry. By hiring those with proven track records, the best of the best. The goal is obviously not to hire 100% of the potential 0-day hunters, but by launching a concentrated poaching effort, to make a sufficient dent.

People have said Apple can buy companies like NSO for less than they probably spend on SEIMs in a year. But as soon as they do that there will be another startup doing the same thing.

The company (GreyShift) that broke the secure enclave had ex-apple security engineers working for them.

They could certainly go out and try and hire some of the best iOS vuln researches. But if they hire the top 10 out there, then #11 gets a massive payrise to go and work for one of the spyware companies.

And if Apple is paying huge amounts of money and getting into bidding wars with all the other companies out there for vuln researches, that'll attract a load more people to start hunting.

If you inject a lot of money into the industry I think it'll result in more people learning how to do it.

Though, the reason governments found the best exploits for the longest time wasn't by hiring geniuses, but by giving people long periods of time and freedom to do kinds of research nobody else was motivated to do.

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