According to Reuters, the U.S. government is the world's largest buyer of malware. In a report on the growing concern in the field of technology and intellectual property the experts stated that Washington participates in the “gray market” vulnerabilities and exploits, which the government uses to answer opponents, committing attacks on the United States, and thus encourages the break-ins and other such practices.
Representatives of cyber security industry are concerned that authorities do not register vulnerabilities purchased by taxpayers’ money and exploiting them to perform retaliatory attacks on foreign networks in order to install cyber weapons and spy technologies.
According to former advisers of the White House cybersecurity Howard Schmidt and Richard Clarke, this makes average American companies and consumers vulnerable to the attacks.
As marked by Reuters, top U.S. officials told Congress this year that poor Internet security “surpassed terrorism to become the single greatest threat to the country”. Authorities consider better information-sharing on risks being crucial.
According to experts, White House owns not only data centers that perform DoS-attacks against enemies’ systems, but also specially crafted software to infiltrate the network of countries with oppressive regimes, such as Stuxnet.
Many malicious programs used by “black hats” can be transferred through USB flash drives, some are spread through e-mail. Some exploits cost $50; many of them are needed for “reliable operations,” and cost about $100 thousand.
