this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Russian zero-day seller offers $20M for hacking Android and iPhones | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
submitted 2 years ago by ijeff@lemdro.id to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.
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[–] tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk 25 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.world 22 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.ca 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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

[–] ilmagico@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago

But a wrench doesn't give plausible deniability ...

[–] Illecors@lemmy.cafe 8 points 2 years ago

Yes, but a wrench doesn't scale all that well.