I just don't understand the doubt and hate. It's perfectly reasonable to distrust the NSA in most cases, but look at the context - the NSA has a huge brain drain and PR problem. They desperately need qualified people to start trusting and applying to them again. Does anyone seriously think they would try to backdoor security researchers in such a stupidly obvious way?
I was actually at the RSA talk where they released the tool - the presenter was very open in saying that this is a recruiting tool. They want college kids just getting into RE to learn their tools and have their name in the back of their mind so they apply for internships and jobs, and are trained for those roles from day zero. There are other benefits to releasing the tool, like free labor and testing from people submitting patches and bug reports, but the real value is in making the NSA appear like the good guys and getting people on their side.
It seems pretty obvious to me that this gives the NSA more benefit than trying (and probably failing) to hack random people. And yet the dude sitting next to me was shaking his head and saying he would only ever run it in a VM. Irrational as hell.
Well, they shouln't have involve in "hacking random people". Then we would trust them. They didn't and they still have surveillance and hacking programs. Why would I expose myself and become a target for the next years? Are they trying to know where are the new targets?
Your comment makes no sense whatsoever. Let's say you're an NSA target. You're probably already hacked. If not, then you are very smart or you haven't been an NSA target for long. Let's assume you're a very smart malware researcher - that means you 1. Already have tools like IDA and don't need this, 2. Have an in depth knowledge of how to acquire and run potentially malicious code safely, 3. Have experience figuring out if that code is malicious.
Do you think the winning strategy for the NSA here is to attack you in a way that you're perfectly equipped to deal with?
I was actually at the RSA talk where they released the tool - the presenter was very open in saying that this is a recruiting tool. They want college kids just getting into RE to learn their tools and have their name in the back of their mind so they apply for internships and jobs, and are trained for those roles from day zero. There are other benefits to releasing the tool, like free labor and testing from people submitting patches and bug reports, but the real value is in making the NSA appear like the good guys and getting people on their side.
It seems pretty obvious to me that this gives the NSA more benefit than trying (and probably failing) to hack random people. And yet the dude sitting next to me was shaking his head and saying he would only ever run it in a VM. Irrational as hell.