The zero-days Desautels brokered had to be in an “ideal state”—that is, they required zero interaction on the target’s end: no spammy text messages or phishing emails like the ones Chinese hackers were known to send. The exploits Desautels developed and brokered had to work 98.9 percent of the time. And if they failed, then they had to “clean fail”—meaning they couldn’t trigger a security alert or crash a target’s computer. No one could know they were being hacked. The operations were simply too sensitive. If the target caught even the faintest whiff they were being targeted, it was game over.
