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Chapter 1 - Closet of Secrets
- Big surprise, the NSA is actually spying on you
- NSA attempted to pay companies, including the RSA, to add backdoors into their encryption algorithms
- CIA infiltrated into actual chips to add backdoors into their systems
- Companies claim to have not granted government backdoors into their software, but have complied with legal requests for customer data
Chapter 4 - The First Broker
- The market for zero-day bugs and exploits has becoming increasingly more lucrative
- Once a zero-day is public, it’s no longer valuable for spies and government agencies.
- Exploits the feds fine are hoarded and kept secret so they have access to data, and they refuse to disclose to journalists or vendors
- Brokers and participants avoid media because it kills business via lost trust, mostly to protect profits.
- Grugq discussed his business with Forbes and was visited by Thai government officials, and lost a lot of possible clientele because no one wanted their business being told to the public.
- Jimmy Sabien was one of the first zero-day brokers, and met with the author in 2015 at a Mexican restaurant; he pioneered buying bugs for intel agencies like the NSA/CIA
- Sabien tried convincing Watters to sell high-value exploits to government buyers for $150k
- Invisible zero-days (such as in printers) are exploited by many agencies worldwide to scrape files
- Deals are shady and often involve cash, face-to-face cons, video demos, and heavy trust. Since this it was pre-Bitcoin, it was inefficient and convoluted.
- Western Union was also used to anonymously transfer money
- Most talented hackers were from Israel, and a lot of them were veterans from Israeli intelligence agencies
- 9/11 increased the value of zero-days by 50%
- There was an exploit in a video memory card that was so powerful that it persisted and was impossible to get rid of.
- The best solution was to just get rid of your computer completely
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