Cool Article on Hackers Selling Zero Day Exploits

[Verahta]

Fun article, had no idea there was a big black market for zero day exploits! I should clarify, I had no idea governments were the biggest customers of the hackers, I knew about hackers selling zerodays to each other.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/world ... ted=1&_r=0

[Ark]

I wonder how much technical knowledge is needed in order to find a flaw on a software. Do you need to be a born genius or just simply know some principles in order to find a 'zero day exploit'? It's pretty cool since you can do a living just doing that.

[Jackolantern]

It would have to be a pretty unreliable source of income. Maybe you could find 3 in a month and have tons of money from it, but then go 8 months without finding one and be dead broke.

Also, some of the largest payouts would likely come from entities you may not really want to help.

[Verahta]

Yeah haha, I would be worried if North Korea or Iran came knocking on my door to buy it. Say no, do they kill you and take it? Say yes, do they kill you and take it anyways?

If you did sell it to them, and they didn't kill you, does the CIA snatch you up and throw you in a black site prison for treason?

Definitely a situation where you want to consider all the angles.

[a_bertrand]

Depends what kind of security exploit you are after and if you have access to the source (either indirectly as de-compiled or the true source) or not (for example for a web service).

If you have access to the code, there is even tools like purify (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Rational_Purify) which let you find areas where the code may have memory leaks for example. You may also look for some areas where you know programmers are lazy and forget to put checks.

If you don't have access to the code, you may use bots (pre-made or self built) which tries a good number of generic attacks and find potential security issues.

Honestly you don't have to be a genius to find bugs. It's much harder to fix a bug that finding one generally