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Comment by everforward | Hacker News Reader

Even better, why would they bother? If it's a non-monetary hack (i.e. for data), hacking them back won't undo leaking the data. If it's a monetary hack, there are surely much better recovery options than trying to do a hack-in-kind to take it back.

It also seems incredibly risky. This US admin might be okay with it, but will the next? For multi-national corporations, will other nations be okay with it? I wouldn't think countries unassociated with the conflict would be happy with digital privateering.

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> For multi-national corporations, will other nations be okay with it?

imagine hacking back and accidentally hitting a hospital killing someone in the process

that is a fast line to get an Interpol terrorist arrest request on your head, sure the US won't hand you over, but have fun to never leave the US and get assets abroad sized

I wouldn’t bet my freedom on the current US admin sticking their neck out to save me. Domestically, they’re hemorrhaging polling numbers and can’t eat the PR hit of “innocent people in a random country died because of what we said”. Abroad, we are in a much weaker position than we were a couple years ago both in terms of alliances and economics. We feel very vulnerable to foreign tariffs with the economy as it is.

Does that happen to state sponsored Iranian hackers?

the comments are about "private firms hacking back"

not about highly specialized groups hacking first

but also "professional hackers" have screwed over hospitals before and confirmed it was accidental, so potentially yes

worse Iranian terrorist with hacking skills might intentional target hospitals and they might not sit in Iran so disconnecting Iran is unlikely to help at all with such a threat

At first I thought this was a joke comment, like you could accidentally fire a hacking missile and hit a hospital… but you’re serious?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3ly4v2kp2o

Hacks that need to cross an air gap are often self-replicating. Ie you get an email with a compromised PDF, and your phone starts distributing it to everything else on the same network so if you connect your phone to the air gapped network it can get in.

Then you end up with collateral damage if your wife or roommate or whatever works at a hospital and they take their infected device to work.

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