: Where are backdoors /security flaws from ?
In: Technology
Computer systems are very complicated, but the computers that run those systems take things literally. Clever people take advantage of those complicated systems to make the computers do what they’re asking and not always what the program writers intended.
My favorite example of a flaw or “hack” comes from the early 2000s and doesn’t involve computer systems at all. It used to be that with a cell phone, you could sign-up for a plan where the nights and weekends were free but you paid by the minute during the day. Someone in the US on the west coast figured out that if they registered with an east coast address, their nights and weekends would start three hours earlier at 2:00 PM instead of at the intended 5:00 pm because of the differences in time zones. The employees that came up with or “wrote” the nights and weekends plan did not expect someone would lie about where they lived, and thus a hack was born.
Computer systems behave just like this, and they take things like dates, times, and locations exceptionally literally. Someone skilled in the art can understand where likely flaws are, and then press on different defects (sometimes combining multiple flaws together) to get the result they want.
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