US Navy caught trying to buy zero-day security flaws
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has spotted the US Navy publicly soliciting people to sell security vulnerabilities to well-known software, so that the US government can build backdoors into the software.
On a page posted to government agency contracting website FedBizOpps, which was deleted shortly after being highlighted by the EFF, the US Navy said the US government needs "to have access to vulnerability intelligence, exploit reports and operational exploit binaries affecting widely used and relied upon commercial software".
Specifically, the security flaws had to be either Zero-Days or N-Days, meaning flaws that were less than six months old, and therefore less likely to have been fixed. The post, preserved by the EFF, specifically mentions the US Navy wants security vulnerabilities relating to software belonging to Microsoft, Adobe, Android, IBM, Apple, EMC, Cisco, Linksys, Linux, EMC and Java.
