this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
749 points (99.1% liked)

Technology

59331 readers
5279 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I don't get these arguments. These tools aren't weapons, and limiting legal access to pentesting tools will decrease corp's and individuals' ability to be proactive about security.

These devices can be manufactured relatively easily and making them illegal will essentially mean the only people doing security tests are criminals. Large tech companies, correctly, run bug bounties where independent security researchers can make income by reporting reproducible and exploitable bugs. The concept here is called offensive security and it's extremely important for building better and more secure platforms. This situation will never be improved by limiting legal access to useful testing tools.

The responsibility should be on automakers and other companies that have massively insecure products, not on open source developers who are making products for security researchers.