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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

Am I wrong in assuming that Vupen's customers are bad people (for values of spam, trojans, bot-net, phishing bad)?

I'm trying to think of why else they wouldn't disclose the protected mode bypass error, but instead keep it "private for our customers".

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According to their website, they provide 'offensive exploit services' to governments and intelligence services. So possibly, depending on wether you view those people as bad people.

They even admit it's not just governments they sell to: VUPEN customers include worldwide governments and major corporations in finance, technology and manufacturing. [http://www.vupen.com/english/company.php] although their continued use of weasel words does stop just short of admitting that they're enabling industrial espionage.

VUPEN's offensive IT intrusion solutions and government grade exploits enable the Intelligence community and government agencies to achieve their lawful intercept missions using VUPEN's industry-recognized vulnerability research and intelligence.

I am trying to imagine a situation where _lawfuly_ government agencies need to break into someones IE. Any ideas?

Collecting information pursuant to a legitimate search warrant?

hmmm.. I think law enforcement agencies need to stay in accordance with the law even with their "discovery". Breaking into someone's IE or exploiting vulnerabilities in order to get information otherwise you wouldn't be able to get falls under breaking into someones "property", I think, even if its "just" an Internet browser.

Therefore, you "legitimate" search warrant will be thrown out of window by a judge, and classified as the Fruit of the poisonous tree.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree

I thought that too, at first, but it seemed to blatantly illegal to believe. Going by their site, it's mostly for government agencies against other agencies?[1] I'm not proficient enough at law to comment on the legalities of it.

Another possibility I had in mind is that they want to get paid by people wanting to fix this vulnerability on their systems. eg, company X will have to come to them if they want their IE browsers to receive the patch against this bug.

[1] http://www.vupen.com/english/services/lea-index.php

I'm not proficient at law either, but I don't think selling exploits is illegal. Unauthorized computer access is, but as long as they aren't doing that access themselves, I think they're in the clear. The analogy I first think of would be a gun store owner not being responsible for the crimes his customers commit. Although perhaps he'd be an accessory if he knew they had criminal intentions? I'm not sure.

Their customers are "Law enforcement agencies and governments". At least officially. But that's scary enough.

The German law enforcement agencies is said to have been a customer of Vupen.

At least they appear to be too high-profile and above-ground to have criminals as their main clients.

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