“A group of hackers has announced a $5 million bounty on the heads of the top 20 internet security researchers in the world, a scheme designed to generate a bounty on any website that exposes any vulnerabilities to the world’s most advanced malware,” Reuters reports.
“The cyber-attack is designed to drive the researchers to make public the vulnerabilities they discovered.
The group of more than 100 researchers have published their findings in the open-source security journal Security.
They have also pledged $5,000 each to the researchers’ families.”
The hacker behind the effort is known as “The Racketeer” or simply “The Crook,” according to Reuters.
“They will not only make it public, they will also use the information to generate an incentive for the researchers who will publish the flaws,” Reuters says.
The Racketeers have been known to target public-facing web sites like Amazon, Google and eBay.
“In response, the cyber-criminals have announced a bounty program that would pay them up to $5m for revealing vulnerabilities, which would then be used to generate revenue,” Reuters adds.
“While the Racketers’ program was designed to attract and reward researchers who published flaws, it could also be used by criminals to leverage vulnerabilities to harvest data and personal information,” Reuters explains.
Reuters notes that the hackers are offering the bounty “to anyone who discovers and publicly discloses vulnerabilities in the public network” of the researchers.
They also say the Ransomware attack will target “the entire internet infrastructure and all major cloud computing providers.”
The researchers are also offering a $1 million reward for any information that reveals the attackers’ identity.
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) “is intended to ensure that the cybersecurity industry is safe and secure by requiring internet service providers (ISPs) to share information about cyber attacks with law enforcement and the intelligence community,” according the Cyber Intelligence and Communications Assistance Team (CICAT), a U.S. Department of Homeland Security agency that coordinates cyber security efforts with other federal, state and local government agencies.
The U.N. agency’s Cybersecurity Committee has recommended the legislation to Congress as a way to combat cyberattacks.
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