Security researcher Charlie Miller sits in his home-office in Wildwood, Missouri, April 30, 2013. REUTERS/Sarah Conard.
The booming market for hacking tools known as zero-day exploits has officials at the highest levels in Washington very worried, reports Joe Menn at Reuters, “even as U.S. agencies and defense contractors have become the biggest buyers of such products.” White House cybersecurity policy coordinator Michael Daniel says the trend is “very worrisome to us.” But as Menn writes in a second piece in this Reuters special report, even as the U.S. government “confronts rival powers over widespread Internet espionage, it has become the biggest buyer in a burgeoning gray market where hackers and security firms sell tools for breaking into computers.”