- Apr 21, 2016
- 4,375
A company called Zerodium has announced an offer that hackers could hardly refuse: $500,000 for exploits in WhatsApp and Signal, two popular mobile messaging apps with hundreds of millions of users across the world.
What the firm is seeking is remote code execution and local privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the two applications, asking for a working hack to pay the $500,000 reward.
And while such an offer could be worrying for users running these apps on their mobile devices, Zerodium is unlikely to turn to these tools to attack users. Instead, what it does is resell zero-day exploits to various organizations, including what could be governments, even though the company doesn’t specifically reveal who buys the hacks.
“ZERODIUM customers are major corporations in defense, technology, and finance, in need of advanced zero-day protection, as well as government organizations in need of specific and tailored cybersecurity capabilities,” the company says on its website, as noted by Mashable.
Read more: Company Willing to Pay $500,000 for WhatsApp Hacks
What the firm is seeking is remote code execution and local privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the two applications, asking for a working hack to pay the $500,000 reward.
And while such an offer could be worrying for users running these apps on their mobile devices, Zerodium is unlikely to turn to these tools to attack users. Instead, what it does is resell zero-day exploits to various organizations, including what could be governments, even though the company doesn’t specifically reveal who buys the hacks.
“ZERODIUM customers are major corporations in defense, technology, and finance, in need of advanced zero-day protection, as well as government organizations in need of specific and tailored cybersecurity capabilities,” the company says on its website, as noted by Mashable.
Read more: Company Willing to Pay $500,000 for WhatsApp Hacks
