The Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reports that the German intelligence agency BND will spend €28 million on what it calls its “Strategic Technical Initiative” (SIT) next year, and that it has asked the German government for an additional €300 million. The German edition of the English-language website “The Local” explains how the money will be used.
The goal of the program is to infiltrate foreign social networks and create an early warning system for cyberattacks.
Government spokesman Steffen Seibert confirmed on Monday that the BND had worked with French computer security firm Vupen, which is known for selling information related to security vulnerabilities to governments, in the past.
Techdirt has written about Vupen recently and highlighted why buying these zero-day for surveillance purposes without patching them makes the internet much less safe for everyone. According to a related story in Der Spiegel, the BND hopes to use the zero-day to undermine the main encryption technology used to protect online communication, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).
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