Informant told FBI that Jeffrey Epstein had a ‘personal hacker’

In Brief

A confidential informant told the FBI successful 2017 that Jeffrey Epstein had a “personal hacker,” according to a document released by the Department of Justice connected Friday.

The document, which was released arsenic portion of the Justice Department’s legally required effort to people documents related to its probe into the precocious enactment offender, does not place who the alleged hacker was, but does see respective details astir them. 

According to the informant, the hacker was an Italian calved successful the confederate portion of Calabria and specialized successful uncovering vulnerabilities successful iOS, BlackBerry devices, and the Firefox browser. 

The hacker allegedly developed zero-day exploits and violative cyber tools and sold them to respective countries, including an unnamed cardinal 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 precise bully astatine uncovering vulnerabilities.”

It’s important to enactment that this papers lone contains allegations from the informant, not from the FBI directly, truthful it’s unclear however trustworthy the accusation and allegations are. 

The FBI declined to remark erstwhile reached by TechCrunch. The Justice Department did not respond to a petition for comment. 

On Friday, the Justice Department announced the release of 3.5 cardinal further pages from the Epstein files. The recently released files, immoderate heavy redacted, see much than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. 

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