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Kevin Mitnick Is Now Selling Zero-Day Exploits

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app103:
This gave me a really sick feeling in my stomach.  :sick:

As a young man, Kevin Mitnick became the world’s most notorious black hat hacker, breaking into the networks of companies like IBM, Nokia, Motorola, and other targets. After a stint in prison, he reinvented himself as a white hat hacker, selling his skills as a penetration tester and security consultant.

With his latest business venture, Mitnick has switched hats again: This time to an ambiguous shade of gray.

Late last week, Mitnick revealed a new branch of his security consultancy business he calls Mitnick’s Absolute Zero Day Exploit Exchange. Since its quiet inception six months ago, he says the service has offered to sell corporate and government clients high-end “zero-day” exploits, hacking tools that take advantage of secret bugs in software for which no patch yet exists. Mitnick says he’s offering exploits developed both by his own in-house researchers and by outside hackers, guaranteed to be exclusive and priced at no less than $100,000 each, including his own fee.

And what will his clients do with those exploits? “When we have a client that wants a zero-day vulnerability for whatever reason, we don’t ask, and in fact they wouldn’t tell us,” Mitnick tells WIRED in an interview. “Researchers find them, they sell them to us for X, we sell them to clients for Y and make the margin in between.”

Mitnick declined to name any of his customers, and wouldn’t say how many, if any, exploits his exchange has brokered so far. But the website he launched to reveal the project last week offers to use his company’s “unique positioning among security researchers and the hacker community” to connect exploit developers with “discerning government and corporate buyers.”
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http://www.wired.com/2014/09/kevin-mitnick-selling-zero-day-exploits/


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Renegade:
This gave me a really sick feeling in my stomach.  :sick:
-app103 (September 26, 2014, 08:44 AM)
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I can understand why he'd do it. It's a kind of perverse revenge for that they did to him. It probably wasn't fun being thrown in a rape cage.

Still... it's perverse.

KynloStephen66515:
An eye for an eye leaves everybody with less eyes.

TaoPhoenix:
I'm not sure how long he'd even survive against the legal system doing this.

I just don't know enough about computer law.

A lot of those kinds of guys are out of reach, buried in Russia/your choice of 10 countries.

But Kevin Mitnick is in in our back yard.

Look what happened to that Dot-com guy. Or is music more important than security?!

mwb1100:
It's like a real life Bond super villain business plan. And this is just the kind of phrase such a character might utter: “discerning government and corporate buyers”

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