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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

No amount of sysadminning was going to save you from state-sponsored zero-day attacks.

I know we'll all get infected, but at least we could try to detect it afterwards is my point

Competent people regularly discover state-sponsored zero-day attacks. Maybe it's a higher level than 'sysadmining', but I suspect there are people who are called sysadmins who do discover these kinds of things.

"State-sponsored" covers a broad range from sending phishing links to zero-click exploit chains. It takes specialized talent to find the latter. Most of those people would not call themselves sysadmins.

Isn't it the sysadmin's job to set up honeypots etc., with the intent of actually getting the zero-day exploit chains?

So they do need that competence if they are to be sysadmins.

Honeypots to catch this kind of thing are very hard to set up. People throwing exploits are generally really careful about targeting.

Yes, of course, but it is possible.

For a phone though, there is an external homogeneity that could make setting it up as a honeypot easier. I'm not incredibly familiar with phone OSs, but I see it as an interesting opportunity.

I have worked on this professionally; it's quite hard. Even getting exploits off of non-honeypot devices is hard. Setting up a honeypot adds even more complexity, especially because of how much fingerprinting attackers do. Before sending the initial payload it's likely that your phone OS, hardware model is already known–they're critical to deploying the exploit. Rough geographical location, who you've been around, which one of your devices is being targeted–all of these are not that hard to get. Once you're on the device and have elevated privileges you can run even more checks!

Yes, but surely getting exploits off non-honeypot devices shouldn't possible in general?

Surely it should only be generally possible if you have special monitoring.

Exploit authors are not perfect and sometimes they leave traces behind in accessible places that can be found if you know where to look.

Did Citizen Lab's sysadminning contribute to the outcome of this legal case to impose financial penalty on a vendor of state-purchased spyware? Or is the penalty considered insignificant to future deterrence?

That's not what Citizen Lab did.

Didn't Citizen Lab perform forensic analysis of victim devices?

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