15 Quotes by Kim Zetter

Under the new policy, any time the NSA discovers a major flaw in software, it must disclose the vulnerability to vendors and others so the flaw can be patched.

After two months passed and they were still finding holes, the company canceled the testing and just shipped the kiosks out. O.

Civil War general Robert E. Lee said famously that it was a good thing war was so terrible, “otherwise we should grow too fond of it.

As Mike McConnell, the former director of national intelligence, told a US Senate committee in 2011, “If the nation went to war today, in a cyberwar, we would lose. We’re the most vulnerable. We’re the most connected. We have the most to lose.

Germany, a Wassenaar member, already has a law that effectively prohibits the sale of exploits as well as the practice of giving them away for free, something that security researchers do regularly among themselves to test systems and improve security.

But withholding information about vulnerabilities in US systems so that they can be exploited in foreign ones creates a schism in the government that pits agencies that hoard and exploit zero days against those, like the Department of Homeland Security, that are supposed to help secure and protect US critical infrastructure and government systems.