How do hackers get proprietary source code?

[jz78817]

@CookingWithGas

It is possible to decompile machine code into C. However, it is rather unreadable. The variable names won’t mean anything. (Compare to Obfuscated Code contest.) Example below.

you’re right, of course. I’ll weasel out of it by saying what I really meant was “you can’t get back to the original source code.”

[beowulff]

@Chronos

And of course, even for closed source code, there are still plenty of methods. You break into the office building, carrying a thumb drive. You bribe the building janitor (or become the janitor yourself) to stick a thumb drive in the computer while the legitimate user is in the bathroom. You take a guy with access out for a few beers after work every day, and talk him into it when he’s drunk. You seduce someone with access, and talk him into it when he’s horny. You call up someone with access, and say that you’re from company IT, and convince them to give you their password. You compromise a close family member of someone with access, and get the person with access to give the relevant information to them. You use some other hack to break into the office’s internal security, and use that to gain access to the source code. You wait for someone else to do one of these things and then either freely release or sell the information they got.

I small company I worked for once hired a programmer from Microsoft. He was a friend of one of the companies owners. When I was introduced to him, the co-owner bragged that he was so awesome, because he had brought the entire source code for Windows NT with him. I was aghast, and told him that we should have nothing to do with that, and that he shouldn’t even bring that hard drive into the office. The co-owner didn’t understand my concern - he thought it was great that we could use that code base to make out product more efficient.

[griffin1977]

@beowulff

I small company I worked for once hired a programmer from Microsoft. He was a friend of one of the companies owners. When I was introduced to him, the co-owner bragged that he was so awesome, because he had brought the entire source code for Windows NT with him. I was aghast, and told him that we should have nothing to do with that, and that he shouldn’t even bring that hard drive into the office. The co-owner didn’t understand my concern - he thought it was great that we could use that code base to make out product more efficient.

The NPR show in the OP explicitly mentioned that what happened was completely legal. So, if they did have C source it must have been open source. Getting hold of proprietary source by some nefarious means, then selling an exploit you discover, would absolutely not be legal.

[CookingWithGas]

@griffin1977

This could be a the incident described in the OP (or a similar one involving the same group).

Sounds similar but I’m not sure it’s the same. The vulnerability was used to create a jailbreak exploit, and the buyer was a Chinese group that wanted to launch their own app store so they could make massive amounts of money by selling apps for jailbroken phones. There is a huge population of jailbroken phones in China so this kind of gray-market app store is incredibly lucrative. There was one group willing to pay $1 million for such an exploit.

[CookingWithGas]

@beowulff

I small company I worked for once hired a programmer from Microsoft. He was a friend of one of the companies owners. When I was introduced to him, the co-owner bragged that he was so awesome, because he had brought the entire source code for Windows NT with him. I was aghast, and told him that we should have nothing to do with that, and that he shouldn’t even bring that hard drive into the office. The co-owner didn’t understand my concern - he thought it was great that we could use that code base to make out product more efficient.

There was a case involving convictions of several people who sold proprietary source code. One of the convicted was a high school classmate of mine. The guy your company hired was incredibly stupid, almost as stupid as the co-owner.

(Another classmate was Ana Montes, a convicted spy. I had a very notorious high school class.)