Hacker News

points by fancyfredbot 3 days ago | 0 comments

Look how incredibly vulnerable our software is, and then consider that our financial and service infrastructure is not being regularly hacked. This is despite several large well funded nation state teams working on finding ways to exploit them.

Why is that? Was it just restraint? North Korea didn't show a lot of that to Binance but perhaps they are leaving traditional infrastructure alone because it's harder to profit from.

Actually it seems somewhat remarkable crypto exchanges aren't hacked more often. I guess that's another message from this - somehow people can build secure infra from these apparently broken pieces. Perhaps there's hope.

[–] Gigachad 3 days ago

Traditional finance can freeze and reverse funds though. North Korea can hack a bank but they can’t get that money out of the country.

[–] wodenokoto 3 days ago

Yes and no. I think parent is moving towards an interesting point.

Why haven’t these been operationalized? NK resorted to social engineering in their latest bitcoin heist despite there been a thousand holes in the system.

To me, this points towards these holes are near impossible for humans and traditional tooling to find and Pandora’s box has been opened, or that these holes are not open to abuse in practice.

[–] saagarjha 3 days ago

I think it points to social engineering being easier in practice to carry out

[–] jimnotgym 3 days ago

'Could allow a local user to gain root'

I guess the answer is that in most applications you are able to keep most users off the box altogether.

[–] inglor_cz 3 days ago

We humans are vulnerable to anthrax or sarin as well, but countries exhibit restraint in using such agents, because retaliation would be gruesome. Having someone going full rogue with cyberattacks could even unite the US and China temporarily in order to whack them.