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by dimino
3976 days ago
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What's not true is that this isn't in the wild. Period. You can make all the points about urgency you want and I will agree completely, but this is not currently in the wild, as far as anyone knows. Saying it actually is being actively used would be factually inaccurate based on the information known right now. |
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We do not have a 100% reliable way to determine whether an exploit is known by others (and likely never will have), and as such there is only one reasonable assumption left to make: assume that it is out in the wild and known by others.
This isn't a new concept - threat modelling requires that you assume every worst-case possibility is reality, so that you can guard against it. This was formalized in the 19th century as Kerckhoff's Principle[1], and undoubtedly existed before that in military circles. This applies equally to software security.
So given that we simply don't and can't know whether it is out in the wild, the most 'correct' assumption is that it is - because that lets us protect ourselves against that worst-case scenario, which may or may not be the case.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle