Shopping For Zero-Days: A Price List For Hackers' Secret Software Exploits

This story accompanies a profile of the French exploit-selling firm Vupen in the April 9th issue of Forbes magazine.

A clever hacker today has to make tough choices. Find a previously unknown method for dismantling the defenses of a device like an iPhone or iPad, for instance, and you can report it to Apple and present it at a security conference to win fame and lucrative consulting gigs. Share it with HP’s Zero Day Initiative instead and earn as much as $10,000 for helping the firm shore up its security gear. Both options also allow Apple to fix its bugs and make the hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPad users more secure.

But any hacker who happens to know one Bangkok-based security researcher who goes by the handle “the Grugq”–or someone like him–has a third option: arrange a deal through the pseudonymous exploit broker to hand the exploit information over to a government agency, don’t ask too many questions, and get paid a quarter of a million dollars–minus the Grugq’s 15% commission.

That iOS exploit price represents just one of the dozens of deals the Grugq (pictured above) has arranged in his year-old side career as a middle man for so-called “zero-day” exploits, hacking techniques that take advantage of secret vulnerabilities in software. Since he began hooking up his hacker friends with contacts in government a year ago, the Grugq says he’s on track to earn a million in revenue this year. He arranged the iOS deal last month, for instance, between a developer and a U.S. government contractor. In that case, as with all of his exploit sales, he won’t offer any other details about the buyer or the seller.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/03/21/meet-the-hackers-who-sell-spies-the-tools-to-crack-your-pc-and-get-paid-six-figure-fees/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamespoulos/2012/03/28/big-brother-2-0-what-if-the-nsa-adopts-facebooks-hacker-way/