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> I doubt they have any professional Linux programmers working for them. Working for the State also means earning only a fraction of what you can earn in the free market.

Fortunately for them there is enough of commercial companies already that sell high-quality spyware to any government that able to pay for it.

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Those companies also lack professional programmers. Actually, such companies sell for extremely expensive software programmed by students or consultants. The CCC disassembled the trojan and found out that they've used simple string manipulations to split Win32-APIs. For example OpenFile was split into "Open" and "File" etc.

In today's world we can assume that the number of programmers with deep knowledge of systems is only going to dwindle

I shudder to think of code written by interns

But why would they split 'Open' and 'File'?

Obfuscation.

It is also a usual trick to avoid detection by "heuristic" antivirus software (even in legit software).

The software was reportedly developed in-house with only a backup purchased from FinFisher.

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