Informant told FBI that Jeffrey Epstein had a ‘personal hacker’
The hacker allegedly developed zero-day exploits and offensive cyber tools and sold them to several countries, including an unnamed central African government, the U.K., and the United States.
A confidential informant told the FBI in 2017 that Jeffrey Epstein had a “personal hacker,” according to a document released by the Department of Justice on Friday.
The document, which was released as part of the Justice Department’s legally required effort to publish documents related to its investigation into the late sex offender, does not identify who the alleged hacker was, but does include several details about them.
According to the informant, the hacker was an Italian born in the southern region of Calabria and specialized in finding vulnerabilities in iOS, BlackBerry devices, and the Firefox browser.
The hacker allegedly developed zero-day exploits and offensive cyber tools and sold them to several countries, including an unnamed central African government, the U.K., and the United States. The informant told the FBI that Epstein’s hacker sold a zero-day to Hezbollah, which paid him with “a trunk of cash.”
Per the informant, the hacker “was very good at finding vulnerabilities.”
It’s important to note that this document contains allegations from only the informant, not from the FBI directly, so it’s unclear how trustworthy the information and allegations are.
The FBI declined to comment when reached by TechCrunch. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
On Friday, the Justice Department announced the release of 3.5 million additional pages from the Epstein files. The newly released files, some heavily redacted, include more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images.
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