The book "This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends" by Nicole Perlroth, while it's about the history of cyberweapons it does a very good job detailing the late 90s to early 2010s exploit market.
I don't have it in front of me, but I'm talking about the "nobody but us" era of exploit markets:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS
Where the NSA seemingly was buying anything, even if not worthwhile, as a form of "munitions collection" to be used for the future attacks.
edit: this mostly ended in the US because other nations started paying more, add in more regulations (only a handful companies are allowed to sell these exploits internationally) and software companies starting to do basic security practices (along with ruling out their own bug bounties), it just mostly whimpered away.
Also relevant to the discussion, the book discusses how the public exploit markets are exploitive to the workers themselves (low payouts when state actors would pay more) and there are periods of times where there would be open revolts too (see 2009 "No More Free Bugs" movement, also discussed in the book).
Definitely worth it if you aren't aware of this history, I wasn't.
I don't have it in front of me, but I'm talking about the "nobody but us" era of exploit markets:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS
Where the NSA seemingly was buying anything, even if not worthwhile, as a form of "munitions collection" to be used for the future attacks.
edit: this mostly ended in the US because other nations started paying more, add in more regulations (only a handful companies are allowed to sell these exploits internationally) and software companies starting to do basic security practices (along with ruling out their own bug bounties), it just mostly whimpered away.
Also relevant to the discussion, the book discusses how the public exploit markets are exploitive to the workers themselves (low payouts when state actors would pay more) and there are periods of times where there would be open revolts too (see 2009 "No More Free Bugs" movement, also discussed in the book).
Definitely worth it if you aren't aware of this history, I wasn't.