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Comment by pcwalton | Hacker News Reader

The problem with that analogy is that the probability that the "bad guys" already know about this vulnerability is vastly higher than the probability that thieves know about how well some random house in the neighborhood is secured.

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But do they? And what portion of them do? And are they using it? There's a lot of speculation here. But surely the average person doesn't know and with this being public knowledge, AND easy to execute there is a bigger chance for crime of opportunity.

It’s always reasonable to assume that black-hats (and… what do you call government hackers — black-suits, helicopter-hats, ???) know everything that white-hats know, and that they either have or are already in the process of selling that exploit to less skilled criminals.

It’s not like being good morally correlates with being good at security.

But that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that since this is so easy, a person that is computer illiterate can now gain root access. You definitely don't post those kinds of things on Twitter.

Computer illiterate people might now have a new way to shoot themselves in the foot, they won’t be able to exploit it because they won’t know what root is or why it does stuff.

How many more people now know about this vulnerability cause of this knuckle-head tweeting it? At least 100k impressions? Now think of how many more "bad guys" have access to this hack that are going to abuse it.

And how many people and companies are now empowered to fix this issue for themselves, immediately.

Not immediately.

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