Hacker Charlie Miller earned $10,000 for cracking a Mac the other day, and will soon be explaining how he went about finding 20 bugs in Apple’s Preview. Miller claims that he will show Apple how to find the bugs, but will not give them details about the bugs themselves.
Following this, a Forbes article looks at how much the black market is willing to pay for such bugs: from $15,000 to $115,000 dollars, currently. Forbes talks to “bug broker” Adriel Desautels, who buys bug information from hackers and sells them to, well, we don’t know. He claims that he doesn’t sell them to cybercriminals, but who else would be willing to pay his prices? In some cases it is the affected vendors, so they can patch their software. In others it is security companies, so they can protect against bugs before their competitors. Some might even be government agencies, whose spies might want them to infiltrate criminal or terrorist groups.
The Mac bug market is growing, Desautels says, even though Mac bugs are worth less than Windows bugs. But the fact that this market exists at this level shows that cybercriminals are looking for new ways to attack Macs.
