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Companies Are Now Offering Seven Figures For Hacks That Allow Spies, Cops To Steal Chat App Messages (vice.com)
Zerodium, a startup that buys and sells hacking tools and exploits to governments around the world, announced on Monday price increases for almost everything they are looking for, such as iOS remote jailbreaks and Windows exploits. "It said it will now pay security researchers $1,000,000 for exploits in WhatsApp, iMessage, and SMS/MMS apps for all mobile operating systems," reports Motherboard. From the report: Compromising the whole iPhone, sometimes referred to as remote jailbreaking or rooting the phone, can cost $2 million or more, and usually involves a series of bugs and exploits. The price increase shows that mobile devices in general are getting more and more secure, and thus harder to hack. That means that it's becoming increasingly hard for hackers to break into iOS and Android devices. That makes the life of folks like spy agencies and police departments harder too. That's where Zerodium and other similar companies, such as Azimuth and Crowdfense, come in: they act as intermediaries between security researchers and government agencies looking for tools -- often called zero-days -- to break into targets. Before today, Zerodium was willing to pay $500,000 for WhatsApp and iMessage exploits, according to an archived version of the company's site. These new prices are in line with the market, according to Maor Shwartz, who used to run a company that acquired and sold exploits to government agencies.
I hope the aforementioned companies are paying their own engineers well.
Once bounties get this high, the thought would cross the minds of many to build in a vulnerability for use later on.
Then again, I suppose the various three letter agencies with their unlimited budgets probably have an engineer or
several on the payroll already. . . .
Consider the Kashoggi killing, which was likely a Whatsapp video call between Prince MBS and the torture team. WhatsApp is always pretend secure, but they forget who owns it, so they use it thinking its secure.
Only Skype and Whatsapp are unblocked in Saudi Arabia, and Jared Kushner has a backchannel to Prince MBS via WhatsApp.... since the henchmen of the Saudi prince would fit in with the prince, it follows that they would also be using WhatsApp rather than Skype. (I've seen claims it was Skype, but those claims don't hold water, Skype is known to be backdoored).
How else do they have both sides of a two way conversation, including video, including Kashoggi screaming as they cut him up, and know that the prince was definitely involved.
If you cut someone up alive, then its for show. If its for show its for the client. We know the client was MBS, Jared's buddie. So we know the snuff show was done live for MBS.
And the remaining questions: Why did Trump and Jared help MBS cover it up, why did Kashoggi get banned from Saudi Arabia after the critical press conference of Trump and does Jared involved in the torture/murder. i.e. how come a US reporter can be murdered with clear evidence and Trump helps conceal the murder.
Of course be sure to mark this -1 because Anti-President Trump folks don't like facts.
Even though I'm a Blue Dog Democrat, I'm sick and tired of the all the Anti-Trump crap on this website. It's about as productive as the new Democrat lead house passing legislation that will never get voted on in the Senate or signed by the President.
Take tax dollars and build a one way bridge to what you think is better country and don't come back. Otherwise, next time around get better candidates to run. BTW, I voted for Trump, I wanted to shake things up and see what happens, like my parties flip-flopping on Illegal Immigration and yes I have citations to back up such claims which people will go ahead and deny because of this source or that source. Facts are sticky things
-GeekPoet