A company that acquires and sells zero-day exploits — flaws in software that are unknown to the affected developer — is now offering to pay researchers

cross-posted from !android@lemdro.id

  • Operation Zero, a Russian company, has increased its bounty for zero-day exploits on iPhones and Android devices from $200,000 to $20 million.
  • The company sells these exploits exclusively to Russian private and government organizations, specifying that the end user is a non-NATO country.
  • The high bounties may be temporary and are a reflection of market demand and the difficulty of hacking iOS and Android platforms.
  • Unlike traditional bug bounty platforms, Operation Zero sells vulnerabilities to governments without alerting the affected vendors.
  • The zero-day market is largely unregulated, but affected by geopolitics, such as new regulations in China that aim to corner the market for intelligence purposes.
  • tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.ukEnglish
    27·
    9 months ago

    Surely someone with that kind of money and need would start with a $5 wrench attack. You can buy a lot of persuasion for $20m.

    • Arbiter@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      9 months ago

      It depends on what you’re trying to do.

      It’s hard to use the $5 wrench on millions of people at a time.

      • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
        6·
        9 months ago

        Which then makes me wonder what they’re looking for, which they couldn’t get otherwise. Data is cheap and we let companies get away with so much

        Maybe they can’t use the wrench on the target without an international incident? So they need to cloud the search by hitting a larger group of people