this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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That's not true, Shadow broker leaks for example contained 0-day found by the NSA well after 2010. And that's only what got published, there's probably more !
There is a difference from finding something you can take advantage of and putting it there though, no? This sounds like the former.
But still, it's a good point, thanks.
Ah sorry, english is not my native language so I'm not sure I fully got what you meant, your point was that they stopped inserting backdoors and instead concentrated on getting access by finding vulnerabilities ?
Basically two points, they stopped inserting backdoors and their backdoors seem to have only ever been to show them what's going on (so this just doesn't look like them to me).
I didn't really comment on "what they do now" as much. I think they do continue to spy, finding preexisting vulnerabilities is definitely one way to spy. I wouldn't be surprised if they report the worst ones in NATO systems to be repaired and keep the others for themselves.
They also tap into weak points like Google and Apple's notification services where things aren't end to end encrypted to gather information. I believe this was revealed recently.
Snowden I recall saying the modern NSA is more interested in metadata than what's actually in the message as well.
In general, I think they still do some shady stuff, but I don't think they do shady stuff that risks compromising a system. This exploit is quite literally a system compromise as (if I understand it correctly) it allows bypassing sshd authentication.