Sure, still got hacked by Russian usb's though. What I'm seeing (the slides, Mr Alexander and so forth) is a huge list of incompetent dinosaurs in key positions. Sure there are skilled - very skilled - people all over the place, NSA, Iran, India, China, Australia, Cyprus (you name it). Sure the NSA employs more mathematicians than anybody else.
They have vision of hackers with AK Rifles on their back, wearing masks? Logos with a planet and a huge eye spying on it?
The flops these Agencies do, might surpass the successes by far. The thing is that you need dig in order to find out the real story. Hollywood even makes movies, advertising epic failures for wins (i.e. Argo, seriously???).
It seems unlikely that similar systems in any country would have remained unpenetrated in the face of that attack.
Just because one entity in a country got hacked, it doesn't mean other entities in the same country can't hack others. At the moment attack seems much easier than defence.
We don't know if the NSA has been penetrated, but given that Google's law enforcement search system was penetrated by unknown parties originating from China it would surprise me if the NSA has remained free from breaches.
Yes, but I'm not sure that justifies the end conclusion:
1. Do we actually know Iran spends $500MM on vulnerability research? What about Belarus?
2. Suppose they do. So they have zero-day exploits, sure. IIUC, you need MITM capabilities to execute an attack on tor like the NSA did. This sounds costly, and I'm not sure it can be outsourced like buying zero-days. It also requires, ummm, "being on good terms" with telcos, backbone providers etc., which I'm not sure Iran is.
So I'm not saying it's inconceivable that Iran can attack tor users, but the opposite also sounds plausible.
