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Comment by bkmintie | Hacker News Reader

Vice has a nice writeup on the exploits as well: https://motherboard.vice.com/read/government-hackers-iphone-...

FTA: It appears that the company that provided the spyware and the zero-day exploits to the hackers targeting Mansoor is a little-known Israeli surveillance vendor called NSO, which Lookout’s vice president of research Mike Murray labeled as “basically a cyber arms dealer.”

Phineas Fisher, we need you now.

So we have cyber arms dealers now. I continue to be amazed at the prophecies of William Gibson. Makes me wonder if there's anything to "remote viewing." Did he just look forward into the 21st century and write down what he saw? :)

BRB, gonna go slot me an icebreaker...

> So we have cyber arms dealers now.

See https://www.zerodium.com/program.html

Someone who discovers/developers a remote Jailbreak like this can apparently sell it for a cool half-million.

For iOS, $500k was quoted in HN-featured media recently. However, $750k was quoted on HN in response to a query perhaps two years ago.

The same company I linked above issued a $1 million bounty for an iOS remote jailbreak vuln late last year (for a maximum of 3 different winners).

By the time the bounty expired only 1 team had won.

https://www.zerodium.com/ios9.html

So pricing has some fluidity, but you're looking at at least 500k.

> "So we have cyber arms dealers now."

Yep. And even middle men who will clear 7 figures taking a 15% fee. A dated article, but it has a "price list" of sorts, which is interesting: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/03/23/shoppin...

There are many private firms in the US doing the exact same thing, and have for years, except they sell exclusively to the US government/NSA. Not sure if it's more or less profitable than being a freelance "cyber arms trafficker".

I think Gibson's explanation is that the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.

Others like Doctorow and Stross has voiced similar views. In Stross' case, he apparently shelved the third part of a trilogy because the NSA was outpacing him.

Yep, apparently he did:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/psa-why-...

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