But number of affected people and the scale of impact was also on another order of magnitude.
Moreover, that tool depended on private companies that operated without any oversight. It’s a very different situation for exploits (although I agree that they often end up in the wrong hands)
NSO is probably one of the worst offenders when it comes to screening their clients. This raises ethical issues. It was a factor for me and many of my former colleagues.
However, for every abusive operation that gets exposed, there are many legitimate ones conducted by democratic governments. I think we are far from a mass-surveillance scenario, and those exploits are not as widely available as the media might portray.
For some reason my original comment got flagged. It went:
I was concerned. Just as much as an average Facebook employee when it turned out someone built a psyop weapon on top of their data to manipulate elections’ outcomes.
People who work there are amongst the most skilled hackers in the world.
Security is very hard and that’s why even solid engineers fail a lot in tackling that. Especially because security is a cost center for vendors, while it’s a profit center for companies like NSO. So the resources invested are relatively more.
That said, Apple did an amazing job to improve security in the past years.
NSO is probably one of the worst offenders when it comes to screening their clients. This raises ethical issues. It was a factor for me and many of my former colleagues. However, for every abusive operation that gets exposed, there are many legitimate ones conducted by democratic governments. I think we are far from a mass-surveillance scenario, and those exploits are not as widely available as the media might portray.