Hackers get rich as spy agencies pay for bugs they find in software
Business is booming for geeks as countries and intelligence agencies pay handsomely for flaws they discover in software that can be exploited
On the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, two Italian hackers have been searching for bugs - not the island's many beetle varieties, but secret flaws in computer code that governments pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn about and exploit.
The hackers, Luigi Auriemma, 32, and Donato Ferrante, 28, sell technical details of such vulnerabilities to countries that want to break into the computer systems of foreign adversaries. The two will not reveal the clients of their company, ReVuln, but big buyers of services like theirs include the US National Security Agency, which seeks the flaws for America's growing arsenal of cyberweapons, and US adversaries like the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
All over the world, from South Africa to South Korea, business is booming in what hackers call "zero days", the coding flaws in software like Microsoft's Windows that can give a buyer unfettered access to a computer and any business, agency or individual dependent on one.
Just a few years ago, hackers like Auriemma and Ferrante would have sold the knowledge of coding flaws to companies like Microsoft and Apple, which would fix them. Last month, Microsoft sharply increased the amount it was willing to pay to a maximum of US$150,000.
Increasingly, however, the businesses are being outbid by countries with the goal of exploiting the flaws in pursuit of the kind of success, albeit temporary, that the United States and Israel achieved three summers ago when they attacked Iran's nuclear programme with a worm that became known as Stuxnet.
The flaws get their name from the fact that once discovered, "zero days" exist for the user of the computer system to fix them before hackers can take advantage of the vulnerability. A "zero-day exploit" occurs when hackers or governments strike by using the flaw before anyone else knows it exists, like a burglar who finds, after months of probing, that there is a previously undiscovered way to break into a house without sounding an alarm.