According to a document released by the Department of Justice on Friday, a confidential informant told the FBI in 2017 that Jeffrey Epstein had a “personal hacker.” The document was released as part of the Justice Department’s legally required effort to publish materials related to its investigation into the late sex offender.
The document does not identify the alleged hacker but includes several details about them. The informant stated the hacker was an Italian born in the southern region of Calabria who specialized in finding vulnerabilities in iOS, BlackBerry devices, and the Firefox browser. The hacker allegedly developed zero-day exploits and offensive cyber tools, selling them to several countries. These countries included an unnamed central African government, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The informant further told the FBI that Epstein’s hacker sold a zero-day exploit to Hezbollah, which paid him with “a trunk of cash.” According to the informant, the hacker “was very good at finding vulnerabilities.”
It is important to note that this document contains allegations from only the informant, not from the FBI directly, so the trustworthiness of the information is unclear. The FBI declined to comment when reached for this story. 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 of which are heavily redacted, include more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images.