UPDATED 21:41 EDT / MAY 30 2017

CLOUD

100 Zcash: Shadow Brokers announces the price of its exploit subscription service

The notorious hacking group Shadow Brokers have revealed more details on its new exploit as a service offering, and for both black-hat and white-hat hackers, access to the trove of exploits won’t come cheap.

The service, simply called “TheShadowBrokers Monthly Dump Service,” will cost those interested in subscribing 100 ZCash a month, currently worth approximately $24,000. Zcash is a fairly new cryptocurrency that launched last October. It uses a blockchain structure similar to that used by bitcoin, but Zcash transactions are not publicly recorded on the distributed ledger, meaning that in theory, the currency offers a much higher level of anonymity than most other forms of cryptocurrency.

Although Zcash is considered safer than bitcoin, The Shadow Brokers warns potential customers that nothing is safe, noting that “F**k no! If you caring about loosing [sic] $20k+ Euro then not being for you.” It then noted that the cryptocurrency has links to the U.S. government, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of Defense and, strangely, Johns Hopkins Hospital. “Why USG is ‘sponsoring’ privacy version of bitcoin? Who the f**k is knowing?” the group adds in its typically broken English.

The service, whose exploits include those obtained from the National Security Agency, is being pitched at “high rollers, hackers, security companies, OEMs and governments” with the group warning “playing ‘the game” involves risks. Those risks include subscribers gambling on what they may get, with the group adding that it hadn’t yet decided on what it will include in the first release. When first announcing the service earlier this month, the group did promise that the monthly releases would include exploits for web browsers, routers, smartphones, operating systems, compromised data from banks and Swift providers and stolen network information from Russian, Chinese, Iranian and North Korean nuclear missile programs.

Tools previously released by the group include the Windows SMB exploit that was used by those behind the WannaCry ransomware that spread across the globe earlier this month.

Photo: Pixabay

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