Early 0-day exploit brokers, some active in the late 90s, share stories about a nascent industry that became key to espionage, organized crime, and war planning
The lucrative business of dealing in code vulnerabilities is central to espionage and war planning, which is why brokers never spoke about it—until now. Tweets: @a_greenberg , @wired , @nicoleperlroth , @ihackbanme , and @3ncr1pt3d Tweets: Andy Greenberg / @a_greenberg : “Even countries you would never suspect are stockpiling exploits for a rainy day...one day soon, they know they might have to reach out and touch someone.” https://www.wired.com/... An interview with one of the first 0-day brokers, from @nicoleperlroth's revelatory new book: @wired : “Zero-days had become a critical component of American espionage and war planning. The Snowden leaks made clear that the US was the biggest player in this space, but I knew that it was hardly the only one.” https://www.wired.com/... Nicole Perlroth / @nicoleperlroth : The Untold History of America's Zero-Day Market | WIRED has an excerpt from my new book “This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends.” https://www.wired.com/... Zuk / @ihackbanme : 0 day hoarding is a thing! Offensive firms hold *multiple vulnerabilities* for *each* part of the exploit chain. The mobile ecosystem is broken and yet you're still *not allowed* to inspect your own devices! Just a friendly reminder that we still need to #FreeTheSandbox https://twitter.com/... @3ncr1pt3d : “The holy trifecta was a string of zero-day exploits and implants that offered reliability, invisibility, and persistence.” This read was more delicious than my coffee. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Nicole Perlroth has spent years pulling the zero-day trade out of the shadows: her reporting traced the cyberweapons arms race in which agencies like the NSA prioritized offense over defense, and FireEye separately documented 55 zero-days it tied to state-sponsored operations between 2012 and 2019. What was missing was testimony from the people who built the market itself.
This piece supplies it — brokers active since the late 1990s, including Zuk (@ihackbanme), speaking for the first time about an industry whose clients ranged from Five Eyes agencies like those served by boutique shop Azimuth Security to, per Snowden-era leaks, a US government that was the market's largest player. The silence is ending just as the trade's costs are becoming visible.
First-order effects
- Early brokers are publicly documenting their client base and pricing history for the first time, exposing a supply chain that Five Eyes agencies, espionage services, and criminal buyers preferred opaque.
- Perlroth and Andy Greenberg gain primary-source material that hardens what until now rested on leak-derived inference about who stockpiles exploits and for what contingencies.
Second-order effects
- Boutique vendors like Azimuth Security face a disclosure environment where their agency clientele can be reconstructed from testimony, raising reputational and legal exposure for firms still operating quietly.
- Insider leakage becomes the market's visible failure mode: the case of a former L3Harris executive who pleaded guilty to selling eight zero-days to a Russian broker shows the broker layer extending into defense contractors' own workforces.
Third-order effects
- If first-person histories keep accumulating alongside studies like the Atlantic Council's finding that too few providers and layers of middlemen inflate US costs, expect pressure toward formalized oversight of the exploit supply chain rather than the current informal broker economy.
- A documented origin narrative makes it harder for governments to treat zero-day acquisition as deniable tradecraft, shifting the debate from whether the trade exists to how it should be regulated and exported-controlled.
The trend: The zero-day market is completing its arc from an unspoken gray trade into a documented industry whose economics, brokers, and state customers are being mapped in public.