Recently I read this post from Maddie Stone of Google's Project Zero:
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/07/detection-deficit-year-in-review-of-0.html . In particular, it has a bolded line of
"
As a community, our ability to detect 0-days being used in the wild is severely lacking to the point that we can’t draw significant conclusions due to the lack of (and biases in) the data we have collected." which is the most honest thing I've read from the defensive community in a long while. Like I feel like it's a good idea to have as a reflexive habit the concept of "What am I looking directly at that I'm not seeing."
As a kid I was obsessed with various elements of biology, despite not having the grades to show for it. But as an adult I wish I could go back in time and just blow my own mind with a few short things I've learned. Most of them are obvious in retrospect, such as the following:
- Birds are dinosaurs
- Genes sometimes travel in-between species, carried by bacteria that infect both of them
- 40% of all animals are parasites
- Metabolism (and cells) evolved before DNA
- Energy Epochs are useful predictive tools
I mean, for most people on this list the same thing is true for hacking. For me these things might include:
- State tables are more important than memory handling
- Timing attacks are impossible to explain to people, so they never get fixed
- Attack tools tend towards generics
- It doesn't matter if they catch you, if they won't ever do the meta-analysis to put the larger picture together
-dave