Aug 24, 2025 · 1909 words · 9 minute read
The Genesis: When Signatures Aren’t Enough 🔗
In the world of mobile security research, there’s a recurring frustration that keeps many of us up at night: the most sophisticated exploits - the ones that really matter - are rarely shared. When Citizen Lab and Google TAG discover NSO Group’s latest 0-click exploits targeting journalists and activists, we get brilliant technical writeups, CVE numbers, and patches. What we don’t get? The actual samples.
This isn’t a criticism - there are excellent reasons for limiting access to weaponized exploits. But it creates a fundamental problem: How do you protect against threats you’ve never seen?
Traditional detection approaches like YARA rules, IOC matching, and signature-based systems fall apart when:
You don’t have the actual malicious samples to create signatures from
The attackers use polymorphic techniques that change file hashes
The exploit leverages legitimate file format features in unexpected ways
You need to detect future variants of the same technique
This is where ELEGANTBOUNCER was born - not from having access to elite exploit collections, but from the opposite: having to detect threats based solely on technical descriptions, vulnerability reports, and proof-of-concept recreations.
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