Can You Ask a Spy Not to Spy? TCB's Cyber Advisory Board Debates

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws in commercial software or hardware for which developers haven’t devised a patch — have existed since the dawn of the Digital Age, but today, former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden said at a meeting of cyber security experts convened by The Cipher Brief, they’re easily discoverable and used by both nation-state actors and malicious hackers.

In the nineties, “it wasn’t really a vulnerability if you didn’t have eight acres of Cray supercomputers in the basement,” Hayden said at The Cipher Brief’s Cyber Advisory Board Meeting.  “We had this concept called NOBUS which meant “nobody but us” could exploit it. It required something only we had, like massive computer power, to exploit it.”