zlacker

>>feross+(OP)
"What can we do to make NSO’s life harder?" That seems pretty simple to me: We ask Western democratic governments (which include Israel) to properly regulate the cybersecurity industry.

This is the purpose of governments; it is why we keep them around. There is no really defensible reason why the chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear industries are heavily regulated, but "cyber" isn't.

>>gnfarg+bf
Nobody has any credible story for how regulations would prevent stuff like this from happening. The problem is simple economics: with the current state of the art in software engineering, there is no way to push the cost of exploits (let alone supporting implant tech) high enough to exceed the petty cash budget of state-level actors.

I think we all understand that the medium-term answer to this is replacing C with memory-safe languages; it turns out, this was the real Y2K problem. But there's no clear way for regulations to address that effectively; assure yourself, the major vendors are all pushing forward with memory safe software.

>>tptace+Xf
You're extremely correct, of course, but what I'm really proposing here is something much more boring than actually solving the technical problem(s). How about a dose of good old-fashioned bureaucracy? If you want to sell exploits, in a Western country, then yeah sure you can, but first you should have to go through an approval process and fill in a form for every customer and have them vetted, yada yada.

This wouldn't do anything to stop companies who base themselves in places like Russia. It wouldn't even really do anything to stop those who base themselves in the Seychelles. But, you want to base yourself in a real bona-fide country, like the USA or France or Israel or Singapore? Then you should have to play by some rules.

>>gnfarg+mo
If you make people fill out paperwork to sell exploits in Israel, Germany, and the United States, they will sell exploits in Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and Kigali. I'm not saying you're expressing it at all, but there is a lot of chauvinism built into the most popular ideas for regulating exploits.