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Price of zero-day exploits rises as companies harden products against hackers


Tools that allow government hackers to break into iPhones and Android phones, popular software like the Chrome and Safari browsers, and chat apps like

Tools that allow government hackers to break into iPhones and Android phones, popular software like the Chrome and Safari browsers, and chat apps like WhatsApp and iMessage, are now worth millions of dollars — and their price has multiplied in the last few years as these products get harder to hack. “The mitigations that vendors are implementing are working, and it’s leading the whole trade to become much more complicated, much more time consuming, and so clearly this is then reflected in the price,” Paolo Stagno, the director of research at Crowdfense, told TechCrunch. Crowdfense currently offers the highest publicly known prices to date outside of Russia, where a company called Operation Zero announced last year that it was willing to pay up to $20 million for tools to hack iPhones and Android devices.

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