A confidential informant told the FBI in 2017 that Jeffrey Epstein had a “personal hacker,” according to documents released Friday by the Justice Department.
The document, released as part of the Justice Department's legally mandated effort to release documents related to investigations into deceased sex offenders, does not specify who the alleged hacker was, but it does contain some details about the hacker.
According to sources, the hacker was an Italian national from southern Calabria who specialized in finding vulnerabilities in iOS, BlackBerry devices, and the Firefox browser.
The hacker allegedly developed and sold zero-day exploits and offensive cyber tools to several countries, including unnamed Central African governments, the United Kingdom, and the United States. An informant told the FBI that Epstein's hackers sold the zero-day to Hezbollah, which paid them a “trunk of cash.”
The hacker was “very good at finding vulnerabilities,” the source said.
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It is important to note that this document contains claims only from informants, not directly from the FBI, so it is unclear how reliable the information and claims are.
The FBI declined to comment when contacted by TechCrunch. The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.
On Friday, the Justice Department announced it would release an additional 3.5 million pages from the Epstein files. The newly released files, some heavily edited, include more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images.