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Meet The Hackers Who Sell Spies The Tools To Crack Your PC (And Get Paid Six-Figure Fees)

At a Google-run competition in ­Vancouver last month, the search giant’s famously secure Chrome Web browser fell to hackers twice. Both of the new methods used a rigged ­website to bypass Chrome’s security protections and completely hijack a target computer. But while those two hacks defeated the company’s defenses, it was only a third one that actually managed to get under Google’s skin.

A team of hackers from French security firm Vupen were playing by different rules. They declined to enter Google’s contest and instead dismantled Chrome’s security to win an HP-sponsored hackathon at the same conference. And while Google paid a $60,000 award to each of the two hackers who won its event on the condition that they tell Google every detail of their attacks and help the company fix the vulnerabilities they had used, Vupen’s chief executive and lead hacker, Chaouki Bekrar, says his company never had any intention of telling Google its secret techniques—certainly not for $60,000 in chump change.

“We wouldn’t share this with Google for even $1 million,” says Bekrar. “We don’t want to give them any knowledge that can help them in fixing this exploit or other similar exploits. We want to keep this for our customers.”

Those customers, after all, don’t aim to fix Google’s security bugs or those of any other commercial software vendor. They’re government agencies who ­purchase such “zero-day” exploits, or hacking techniques that use undisclosed flaws in software, with the ­explicit ­intention of invading or disrupting the computers and phones of crime suspects and intelligence targets.

In that shady but legal market for security vulnerabilities, a zero-day exploit that might earn a hacker $2,000 or $3,000 from a software firm could earn 10 or even 100 times that sum from the spies and cops who aim to use it in secret. Bekrar won’t detail Vupen’s exact pricing, but analysts at Frost & Sullivan, which named Vupen the 2011 Entrepreneurial Company of the Year in vulnerability research, say that Vupen’s clients pay around $100,000 annually for a subscription plan, which gives them the privilege of shopping for Vupen’s techniques. Those intrusion methods ­include ­attacks on software such as Micro­soft Word, Adobe Reader, Google’s ­Android, Apple’s iOS operating systems and many more—Vupen bragged at HP’s hacking competition that it had exploits ready for every major browser. And sources familiar with the company’s business say that a single technique from its catalog often costs far more than its six-figure subscription fee.

Even at those prices, Vupen doesn’t sell its exploits exclusively. ­Instead, it hawks each trick to multiple government agencies, a business model that often plays its customers against one another as they try to keep up in an espionage arms race.

Bekrar claims that it carefully screens its clients, selling only to NATO governments and “NATO partners.” He says Vupen has further “internal processes” to filter out nondemocratic nations and requires buyers to sign contracts that they won’t reveal or resell their exploits. But even so, he admits that the company’s digital attack methods could still fall into the wrong hands. “We do the best we can to ensure it won’t go outside that agency,” Bekrar says. “But if you sell weapons to someone, there’s no way to ensure that they won’t sell to another agency.”

That arms-trade comparison is one Vupen’s critics are eager to echo. Chris Soghoian, a privacy activist and fellow at the Open Society Foundations, calls Vupen a “modern-day merchant of death,” selling “the bullets for cyberwar.” After one of its exploits is sold, Soghoian says, “it disappears down a black hole, and they have no idea how it’s being used, with or without a warrant, or whether it’s violating human rights.” The problem was starkly illustrated last year when surveillance gear from Blue Coat Systems of Sunnyvale, Calif. was sold to a United Arab Emirates firm but eventually ended up tracking political dissidents in Syria. “Vupen doesn’t know how their exploits are used, and they probably don’t want to know. As long as the check clears.”

Vupen is hardly alone in the exploit-selling game, but other firms that buy and sell hacking techniques, including Netragard, Endgame and larger contractors like Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, are far more tight-lipped than Bekrar’s small firm in Montpellier, France. Bekrar describes his company as “transparent.” Soghoian calls it “shameless.”

“Vupen is the Snooki of this industry,” says Soghoian. “They seek out publicity, and they don’t even realize that they lack all class. They’re the Jersey Shore of the exploit trade.”

Even so, Bekrar won’t share revenue numbers, though he insists the firm is profitable. One person who will share those sales numbers is a South African hacker who goes by the name “the Grugq” and lives in Bangkok. For just over a year the Grugq has been supplementing his salary as a security researcher by acting as a broker for high-end exploits, connecting his hacker friends with buyers among his government contacts. He says he takes a 15% commission on sales and is on track to earn more than $1 million from the deals this year. “I refuse to deal with anything below mid-five-figures these days,” he says. In December of last year alone he earned $250,000 from his government buyers. “The end-of-year budget burnout was awesome.”

But the Grugq assesses Bekrar’s startup, which generates all its own exploits, as significantly more lucrative. “He’s pretty f—ing smart,” says the Grugq. “He holds all the cards. He can tell his clients to buy at the price he’s ­offering, or someone else will.”

Despite his talk about “transparency,” Bekrar won’t say much about his personal history or career prior to founding Vupen—not even his age. But Vupen is his third try at a startup focused on digging up software-security bugs. His previous companies, K-Otik and FrSIRT, made their bug findings public. Even after founding Vupen (whose name stands for “vulnerability research” and “penetration testing”) in 2008, Bekrar and his researchers initially worked with some software vendors to patch their flaws. But after taking $1.5 million in venture capital from 360 Capital Partners and Gant & Partners, Bekrar found that the firm could earn far more by keeping its findings under wraps and selling them at a premium.

Lately Bekrar goes so far as publicly taunting the companies whose products he hacks. In May 2011 Vupen released a video showing that it could penetrate a machine running Chrome but offered no further information to Google. When Google responded that Vupen’s exploit targeted the Flash ­plug-in that runs in the browser rather than Chrome itself, Bekrar accused the company on Twitter of downplaying its vulnerabilities and called it “pathetic.” Google security staffers responded by scolding Bekrar for disregarding users’ privacy and called him an “ethically challenged ­opportunist.”

Bekrar shrugs off the insults. “We don’t work as hard as we do to help multibillion-dollar software companies make their code secure,” he says. “If we wanted to volunteer, we’d help the homeless.”

(Source: forbes.com)

Lessons Learned in 2011

merlin:

meghanagain:

fightwithknives:

1. Just like you didn’t see 27 Dresses when it came out, begin avoiding 95% of writing that uses personal pronouns, which means almost everything online. It doesn’t matter if it’s written by someone you’ve met in real life, or in a publication you’ve read any liked before. If it’s someone who claims “my ‘I’ gives me transparency,” they are playing football and you want to be watching Nadal. Their way is not wrong, but it’s certainly not to your taste.
2. If there’s no flow or style, don’t bother with that either.
3. Also, collect a blacklist of bylines and URLs that make you angry, and avoid them, too. Sure it’s Nixonian, but it will also help you write more about things you care about writing about… rather than writing about things that piss you off.
4. Reading work that pisses you off doesn’t help you “see what’s out there” because it’s really easy to see what’s out there with a glance, and not an in-depth engagement.
5. The internet systems of writing suck. It’s a forced pissoff economy. Go to Slate and Salon and read “why x is ying z” or “the 8 people who give you reasons to hate everything” or any other “cliffhanger clickthrough” headlines and ignore all of them. Write down the number of times per month you learn anything from one of those stories. (It’s zero, or maybe one.) There’s no worthy payoff from a cliffhanger, just write a hook. A cliffhanger is not a hook. A cliffhanger lacks the style and intrigue of a complex detail or imperfect theme.
6. There is joy joy joy everywhere amid all the bullshit and your job is to find the joy in the bullshit, even when the joy is just in the craft of it, even if you are reporting on it, find the fucking joy, and the joy is not in yourself, writers are conduits not subjects, or at least writers make joy by constructing it within the worst of situations. “Joy” in this context is not so much “happiness” as “exuberance.”
7. It feels good to write sentences like the sentences in point 6, but keep them on your blog and not in your serious writing.
8. The best cure for bad internet is making your own thing that is not a response to another thing but building your own whatever. 
9. Stop reading bad writing. Keep writing good writing.

re: 3 (and 4 and 5)… the secret to my success is the mindful browsing safari plugin

re: 8… building magic map and busvetica was fun, and it’s been great to hear from people who like it. working on my own version of telestrator 2 was a lot more rewarding than dealing with the guy working on the original version. I need to do more of that.

Antinous comments on the often-overlooked backstory of spam:

Once you get past the boner pills, a lot of spam is for small businesses. Which means that Mister SEO Sleazeball wandered down Main Street in Pleasantville convincing EZ Garage Doors and Reliable Plumbing that they should pay him $2,500 to create an online presence to build their businesses. Or the real estate broker or the head of the local dentists’ association got talked into letting him speak at the monthly meeting, where he duped a few of them into participating in this newfangled internet thing.

So, for a lot of them, the businesses that seem to be spamming us are actually the ones who are being victimized. Of course, a lot of our spammers are actually pushing themselves as SEO/Marketing consultants. It’s a real, live demo of their marketing tactics: take the client’s $2,500 and pay a spammer in Mumbai $5 to randomly bombard online forums.