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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

> The much more logical explanation is someone approached a low level employee at the MEAF who turned over a USB stick with the governments org charts and payroll records in exchange for their kids getting a full ride to a prestigious foreign university.

If there are spies in foreign countries going around offering life-changing sums of money for USB sticks, which people are accepting

is it not also plausible that folks at google/samsung/apple/aws/cloudflare/microsoft are getting offered life-changing sums of money for leaving their work-from-home laptop unattended for 5 minutes?

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This is the thing that has always concerned me about Cloudflare. The structure of their operation is "we do a MITM on most of the encryption on the internet". Even if that doesn't make you immediately suspicious that it was set up as a spying operation on purpose (compare "encryption added/removed here" Snowden slide), it makes them a massive state espionage target. Do they really have the ability to resist that level of persistent targeting from every country in the world?

Cloudflare is a US company right? One assumes it’s controlled (if not directly, then indirectly) by US intelligence interests. That would protect it from non US intelligence influence would it not?

Does the US intelligence apparatus protect its networks with some kind of theurgy preventing the government of Russia or Iran from finding any 0-day before they do from time to time, and have a source of infallible humans immune to bribery or extortion?

Yes, this happens. Industrial espionage is popular.

From what I've seen with bribes, it doesn't even take life-changing amounts of money.

I imagine in a country like Iran where there is a sizable minority that hates the regime, someone might have done it for free.

Imagine all countries

> google/samsung/apple/aws/cloudflare/microsoft

One thing to keep in mind is those people are already paid quite well. What life can you offer them that they don't already have? Blackmail is a likelier angle.

You'd be surprised. We had a cop making over $250k/year extorting people for $20 bribes here. It isn't always about the money.

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