Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Govt Pays Phone Hackers”.
This came across my news feed and I was like what operation zero. A russia-based company that sells zero day exploits is offering to pay researchers up to 20 million dollars for hacking tools that would allow its customers to hack, iPhones and Android devices. Previously, it was offering only two hundred thousand for exploits for those platforms. According to the operation, zero Twitter account, the increased payout is in response to high market demand, but it is also likely a reflection of the difficulty of hacking, IOS and Android devices when we’re talking about the kind of Hack That would be worth 20 million dollars.
We’Re talking something that would require no user intervention and would be completely transparent to the user, so um at the end of their announcement operation, zero specifies, as always, the end user is a non-nato country. So these These are governments that are seeking these tools, not individuals. On their official website, they State our clients are Russian private and government organizations only okay, apparently some private ones. When asked why their CEO responded, no reasons other than obvious ones. Can I just say that that is just about the most Russian response to anything you know.
Yeah kinda, I wonder um, I didn’t actually read the bit about uh. It’S for the Russians or whatever part of me had like this weird, somewhat dubious theory that somebody had a zero day and wanted a lot of money for it. So they were like, let’s put out a bounty, to try to get more money from some Bounty program that, like apple actually has um. I don’t know because uh those Bounty programs do exist, and I know that the market for bringing them to guys like this, the market price – it’s much more lucrative, because they they these guys, know that they have to bid against apple and Google’s own Bounty programs.
Our discussion question here is pretty much: does the price increase indicate good things about the state of Android and Apple security yeah? It kind of seems that way I mean. Obviously, I think that the paranoid Among Us, the the justifiably paranoid Among Us, do tend to treat our phones like they’re, pretty much always listening and pretty much always watching, but is it possible that that is not as much the case anymore, foreign like you’re, not going To spend 20 million dollars on an exploit to spy on you, no offense, you might be putting out a broad spy program, so I wonder you might get caught in the crossfire, but I don’t know. I don’t know that you could jump to saying that.
That’S potentially not the case anymore uh, because yeah, I think I think bradyboy 26 info plane shot, is on to what I’m saying are going to be saying um, which is that type of data collection. It might just not be available to these people, so they still need their own access to whatever it might be grabbing sure that makes sense. Um and our other discussion question is: what does it mean that the primary clients for these kinds of services are governments? I mean, I guess, I think the answers to that are only the obvious ones. I guess it means that Google and apple are not cooperating too much because they definitely cooperate a little at least not with the ones that are trying to buy this yeah. That’S fair enough: they could be cooperating plenty with the others which makes them kind of the Arbiters of who should have this information this whole. This whole topic makes me extremely uncomfortable, which is why I brought it up um.
I just I got ta be honest with you, I didn’t really, and maybe this is just naivety. I I didn’t really think that zero day no user intervention, I remotely accessed your phone and I have control over it. At this point, I didn’t think it was very common today. I don’t think it is. I think that’s the only reason why it’s worth so much fair enough. .