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Government hackers are leading the use of attributed zero-days, Google says
Governments like China and North Korea, along with spyware makers, used the most recorded zero-days in 2024.
Hackers working for governments were responsible for the majority of attributed zero-day exploits used in real-world cyberattacks last year, per new research from Google. Sadowski specifically pointed to Lockdown Mode, a special feature for iOS and macOS that disables certain functionality with the goal of hardening cellphones and computers, which has a proven trackrecord of stopping government hackers; as well as Memory Tagging Extension(MTE), a security feature of modern Google Pixel chipsets that helps detect certain types of bugs and improve device security. Reports like Google’s are valuable because they give the industry, and observers, data points that contribute to our understanding of how government hackers operate — even if an inherent challenge with counting zero-days is that, by nature, some of them go undetected, and of those that are detected, some still go without attribution.
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