There are always two sides of a coins, in real life it’s either good side or the bad side. Hacking any software, be it mobile operating system, desktop operating system or any other daily life software has two different side, either you could become knight and responsibly report it back to the owner of that software or you can use it to benefit people for a greater good like jailbreaking. Jailbreak developers spend countless hours to find vulnerabilities in every iOS update to exploit them and release a jailbreak for millions of jailbreakers all over the globe. But according to a recent report from Forbes there is a third side as well, hackers can also sell their zero-day exploit to governments, secret agencies, and other independent spying agencies which can use them in any way they want.
The process works more like any other daily deal we make in business, there’s a selling party in this case they are hacker then there’s a buying party in this case as I mentioned above they’re different governments and secret agencies and then we have middlemen like “Grusq”. Grusq is a middleman which makes a handsome amount of money by hooking hackers up with different government agencies. The deal is pretty simple if you have a zero-day exploit and the government wants it you can get a good amount of money depending on the type of vulnerability you’ve discovered.
iOS leads in this underworld market hackers as well, iOS exploits and vulnerabilities cost way more than any other OS available in market right now. Grusq recently traded a iOS related vulnerability for quarter of a million dollars ($250,000) which gives us a hint of money involved in this business.
According to the report:
That iOS exploit price represents just one of the dozens of deals the Grugq has arranged in his year-old side career as a middle man for so-called “zero-day” exploits, hacking techniques that take advantage of secret vulnerabilities in software.
Like any other underground market there are different types and categories of customers, Russian are known for paying less for an exploit while Chinese are are a little “depressed”. Grusq discussed the importance of Comex’s JailbreakMe 3.0 exploit which was the one and only jailbreak solution for iPad 2 for months and said that agencies would’ve been willing to pay a staggering $250,000 for his JailbreakMe 3.0 PDF exploit. Android losses the battle even when is comes to zero-day exploits, an iOS vulnerability/exploit is more valuable than iOS’. Here’s an image which will give you a rough idea about prices on which hackers sell their exploits.
You can follow Ahmed Omar on , join our and add me on to keep yourself updated on the latest jailbreak and unlock news.