Italian 'hackers' operating from Malta - New York Times

Two Italian 'hackers' have been quietly working in Malta on the search for flaws in computer code that governments pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn about and exploit, The New York Times has reported. 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. Until a few years ago, such hackers would have sold the knowledge of coding flaws to companies like Microsoft and Apple, which would fix them. But increasingly 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 enrichment program with a computer worm that became known as “Stuxnet,” the newspaper said. The market for information about computer vulnerabilities has turned into a gold rush. Disclosures by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. consultant who leaked classified documents, made it clear that the United States is among the buyers of programming flaws. Israel, Britain, Russia, India and Brazil are also some of the...