A company that acquires and sells zero-day exploits — flaws in software that are unknown to the affected developer — is now offering to pay researchers

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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    Operation Zero, which is based in Russia and launched in 2021, also added that “as always, the end user is a non-NATO country.” On its official website, the company says that “our clients are Russian private and government organizations only.”

    Zelenyuk also said that the bounties Operation Zero offer right now may be temporary, and a reflection of a particular time in the market, and the difficulty of hacking iOS and Android.

    “The price formation of specific items is heavily dependent on availability of the product on the zero-day market,” Zelenyuk said in an email.

    For at least a decade, various companies around the world have offered bounties to security researchers willing to sell the bugs and hacking techniques to exploit those flaws.

    Unlike traditional bug bounty platforms like Hacker One or Bugcrowd, companies like Operation Zero don’t alert the vendors whose products are vulnerable, but instead sell them to government customers.

    Crowdfense, a competitor based in the United Arab Emirates, offers up to $3 million for the same kind of chain of bugs on Android and iOS.

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