Cyber-arms industry

The cyber-arms industry is a term used to describe the markets and associated events surrounding the sale of software exploits, zero-days, cyberweaponry, surveillance technologies and related tools. The term may extend to both grey and black markets online and offline.

For many years, the burgeoning dark web market remained niche, available only to those in-the-know or well funded. Since at least 2005, western governments including the U.S., United Kingdom, Russia, France, and Israel have been buying exploits from defence contractors and individual hackers. This 'legitimate' market for zero day exploits exists but is not well advertised or immediately accessible.

Attempts to openly sell zero day exploits to governments and security vendors to keep them off the black market have so far been unsuccessful.

Traditional arms producers and military services companies such as BAE Systems, EADS, Leonardo-Finmeccanica, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Thales have all expanded into the cybersecurity markets. However smaller software companies such as Blue Coat and Amesys have also become involved, often drawing attention for providing surveillance and censorship technologies to the regimes of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

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