I don't know about everyone else but it's the first part of that title that catches my interest. "Executed a hack via MS Office -- yeah, great but tell me more about the role of 'NSA Hacker'..." Notwithstanding the "What? No way..." revelations in Edward Snowden's book about the United States' SIGINT-via-internet abilities I suspect Snowden didn't even know the half of it.
> I suspect Snowden didn't even know the half of it.
Obviously, we’ll never know exactly how much he knew relative to the entire scope of the intelligence community, but he pointed out multiple times that he had pretty broad access to a range of tools and KBs based on his work integrating various tools for the government.
He’s said himself that he doesn’t know everything, but given his ascent in the government contracting world due to his technical skill prior to his departure, I think it’s fair to take him at his word when he said that there wasn’t a whole lot he didn’t have access to in terms of IT systems and databases.
So if I create an test.slk file on my desktop, then rightclick > open with, and select an app like Sublime (to be sure no other office apps like LibreOffice), to open all files like this in the future by default, will that solve this problem?
Patrick Wardle is a well-known security researcher focused on macOS, and founder of Objective-See which provides free (as in beer)"simple, yet effective OS X security tools."
6 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 25.3 ms ] threadObviously, we’ll never know exactly how much he knew relative to the entire scope of the intelligence community, but he pointed out multiple times that he had pretty broad access to a range of tools and KBs based on his work integrating various tools for the government.
He’s said himself that he doesn’t know everything, but given his ascent in the government contracting world due to his technical skill prior to his departure, I think it’s fair to take him at his word when he said that there wasn’t a whole lot he didn’t have access to in terms of IT systems and databases.
This is unlike the Mac native apps such as "Pages" which is not sandboxed.