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Meet the Tiny Startup That Sells IPhone and Android Zero Days To Governments (vice.com)

Posted by msmash on from the closer-look dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The story of Azimuth Security, a tiny startup in Australia, provides a rare peek inside the secretive industry that helps government hackers get around encryption. Azimuth is part of an opaque, little known corner of the intelligence world made of hackers who develop and sell expensive exploits to break into popular technologies like iOS, Chrome, Android and Tor.

3 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ethics? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And this is ethical because...?????

    Because it's profitable of course..

  2. Re:Ethics? by bobbied · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And this is ethical because...?????

    They do claim to only sell their uncovered secrets to a "select group of countries and not repressive" ones.

    provides exploits to ... the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

    That's how they answer this ethics question. Which may or may not work for you.

    --
    "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
  3. Re:Ethics? by Muckluck · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Ethics has a simple definition that is extremely difficult to apply.

    Ethics, in a nutshell, is "Do the right things for the right reasons". Figuring out and agreeing upon what the right things are and what the right reasons are, is the hard part. Everything with ethics depends on context. Lying may or may not be ethical depending upon the situation at hand. Lying to a man who has a school full of children as hostages, ethical. Lying to your spouse about cheating, unethical. And the lying part of the unethical example I just gave may have other situational conditions that make it ethical.

    Context is key and ethics are in the eye of the beholder...

    --


    --I like turtles...