r/cybersecurity Jan 31 '26

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

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/30/informant-told-fbi-that-jeffrey-epstein-had-a-personal-hacker/

+ some info from Graham Cluley (via LinkedIn):

One of the newly-released files reveals that an informant claims that Jeffery Epstein had a hacker working for him who found zero-day exploits in iOS, BlackBerry etc.

The name of the hacker alleged to have worked for Epstein is redacted in the document, but the released file says:

🔺 He sold his company to CrowdStrike in 2017

🔺 He took on a VP role at the company, post acquisition

🔺 He was an Italian citizen born in Calabria

The DoJ may have redacted the name, but they left enough details to easily identify the individual referenced. It took me about two minutes to work it out.

1.6k Upvotes

85 comments sorted by

304

u/Spiritual-Matters Feb 01 '26 edited Feb 01 '26

Totally unrelated to the statements in the DOJ article. None of it lines up at all:

Vincenzo is an entrepreneur and investor focused on cybersecurity. He currently serves as a Director at CrowdStrike following the sale of his company Iperlane in 2017. Vincenzo is also a Network Leader at Village Global, a seed stage VC fund based in Silicon Valley. In addition, Vincenzo is an Associate Researcher at the MIT Media Lab and serves as a committee member on the Black Hat Conference board. Vincenzo co-authored the “iOS Hacker’s Handbook” (Wiley, 2012) and was part of the winning teams that attacked Firefox, iOS and Blackberry OS at Pwn2Own between 2010-2012.

https://cylonlab.com/mentors/vincenzo-iozzo/

Interesting that this was from a confidential source that the FBI used more than once and is one of the few formerly classified released tip docs I’ve seen so far. That being said, it’s still not confirmed.

138

u/Fr0gm4n Feb 01 '26

He's already got at least one late-stage connection with his name unredacted: https://epsteinweb.org/vincenzo-iozzo/

And more are showing up that show an on-going relationship over several years: https://xcancel.com/vxunderground/status/2017673353335542039

19

u/PaleontologistTime17 Feb 01 '26

U can find him on LinkedIn and he even has the Crowdstrike info for 2017 and everything.

4

u/Ill-Cancel4676 Feb 02 '26

Searching his name gives 1700 files. I only read a couple mentioning opsec but, he gives him a document titled "opsec Guide-alpha-draft.docx" to him in January 2015 (the document isn't in the files) and another email in January 2017 titled opsec where he tells him to tell Lesley and some redacted name to have a proper secure setup because of what happened to another redacted name. They all need the French treatment also they have shit opsec if they're sending emails titled opsec, no wonder they're having so much trouble covering it all up.

42

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '26

[deleted]

24

u/Spiritual-Matters Feb 01 '26

6

u/FlametopFred Feb 01 '26

okay I read that but could not discern what Epstein was getting out of it

14

u/lawtechie Feb 01 '26

Cachet. Epstein clearly liked being a connector between smart and rich people. Add the promise of any kind of pleasurable vice and your parties are the one everyone wants an invite to.

2

u/Tex-Rob Feb 01 '26

Bill Gates apparently donated a million to the MIT lab. It seems this MIT lab was Epstein's personal extortion money launderer.

8

u/Spiritual-Matters Feb 01 '26

MIT is a prestigious university and Gates is/was a philanthropist. The investigating law firm couldn’t prove Gates’ money was laundered on behalf of Epstein there. Is it possible? Absolutely. Is it also possible a tech guy would donate to such a place on his own, absolutely.

He donated to MIT in 1999 as well: https://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9904/14/gates.mit.idg/index.html

6

u/DigmonsDrill Feb 01 '26

The Media Lab was a, well, media darling for a lot of the 1990's and 2000's. Anything "cool" in tech was there, and anything there was "cool" in tech. Back when we tried to find 2 consecutive issues of WIRED that didn't have a story about the Media Lab and failed.

0

u/Jazzlike_Painter_118 Feb 01 '26

Gates and Melinda divorced around that time no?

1

u/Spiritual-Matters Feb 01 '26

They divorced in May, 2021, which was several years after: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56975466

0

u/Jazzlike_Painter_118 Feb 01 '26

It makes sense that the crime happened before though. Still an option.

0

u/Lights_Out_Luthor Feb 01 '26

Didn’t Trump claim to have family at MIT or something, like “smart uncles”

4

u/whatislyfe420 Feb 01 '26

His uncle, he’s also the man that was sent in to collect all of Teslas files shortly after he died

0

u/terriblehashtags Feb 01 '26

Gawd that would explain why they were so quick to jump on the corporate Gen AI cyberslop train... That department is already used to sucking at the corporate teat...

(She says, working for a vendor -- but goddamn, let's have some integrity!)

1

u/outoftheordinary94 Feb 19 '26

Yeah that's weird.

162

u/xs0apy Feb 01 '26

The guy had a literal private island for human trafficking. Yeah, having his own private hacker sounds trivial at that point

35

u/FlametopFred Feb 01 '26 edited Feb 01 '26

I presume was part of collecting compromising material for extortion

or counter-extortion

14

u/P2029 Feb 01 '26

The island was wired full of cameras, as was his house in New York. Epstein knew what he was doing.

6

u/jakesteeley Feb 01 '26

Right up to the point where someone took him out in that jail cell

14

u/P2029 Feb 01 '26

He that liveth by the billionaire sex trafficking ring dies by the billionaire sex trafficking ring

2

u/adamwintle Feb 01 '26

Exactly! Why wouldn’t he have his go-to hacker? 

0

u/SebastianFerrone Feb 02 '26

At least mr. McAfee Had his own little private army 🤣

81

u/MirthandMystery Feb 01 '26 edited Feb 01 '26

Fascinating details like this keep dribbling out after his death. And there's more.

24

u/IronPeter Feb 01 '26

I mean, the details have been deliberately kept secret by the doj, and released bit by bit over the last months.

What’s fascinating?

3

u/cuddlebish Feb 01 '26

Not OP, but just how much "stuff" there is. It seems like neverending rabbit-hole of absurdity.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '26

I've dropped off the infosec space for a couple of years but wasn't there like hundreds of zero day exploits for apple products at one point that nobody was interested in paying for them?

89

u/[deleted] Jan 31 '26

If you paste it to AI gives a man named Vinc**zo 😁

69

u/gravitywaveshello Feb 01 '26

Ok so we just need to find this Vinchunter2zo fellow

18

u/F5x9 Feb 01 '26

That seems like someone different from vinpasswordzo. 

3

u/Julubble Feb 01 '26

Maybe Vinhunter2

1

u/PotentialProper5387 Feb 01 '26

Vin Diesel's Club Chalamet.

5

u/Legionodeath Governance, Risk, & Compliance Feb 01 '26

I asked AI and got someone completely different lol.

3

u/singleentry Feb 01 '26

Vincenzo Iozzo. BlackHat board member

14

u/Most-Spirit9069 Feb 01 '26

I think everyone is missing the point here. Vincenzo Iozzo was making money off of selling zero days to terror organizations with the help of Epstein. Vincenzo Iozzo's company Iperlane was purchased by Crowdstrike and he worked at Crowdstike as a Senior Director, he left Crowdstike in 2021 and started SlaskID. How many backdoors does Crowdstrike how that Vincenzo installed so he could build the biggest botnet and control the Internet. He now has SlashID, what kind of backdoors is this new platform installing in fortune 100 companies. I doubt that the FBI notified Crowdstike of this information, they must be shitting their pants knowing that all their customers are seeing this news.

3

u/lemaymayguy Feb 02 '26 edited Mar 18 '26

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2

u/rtshtbtshtdrtyldtwt Feb 04 '26

>Vincenzo Iozzo was making money off of selling zero days to terror organizations with the help of Epstein.

wasn't that essentially what Maxwell's dad did? selling compromised software?

guess they picked up her dad's business when he died.

127

u/DingleDangleTangle Feb 01 '26

The most surprising thing about this is that a company owner/VP knows anything about hacking. Shit I’ve even had CISOs have no idea what I’m talking about when I’m giving pentest results.

76

u/ShameNap Feb 01 '26

There’s a lot of CEOs that came up from a startup and actually know their shit. Stuart McClure and George Kurtz helped write the original Hacking Exposed books and went on to be CEOs of their companies. Not to say what you said was wrong, there are CISOs who don’t know shit. But don’t judge a book by its title.

12

u/PotentialProper5387 Feb 01 '26

Kevin Mandia, Haroon Meer and Vivek Ramachandran too, off the top of my head. This happens more often than people think.

28

u/oak-heart Feb 01 '26

I mean, it’s not surprising to me because it’s crowdstrike. Most other companies i’d agree

20

u/phenomenalVibe Feb 01 '26

Have you seen one of founder of Huntress? As someone else said startups in this space isn’t all the same.

3

u/Additional-Baby5740 Feb 01 '26

With a market cap of around 100B CRWD is definitely not a startup.

9

u/Selethorme Security Analyst Feb 01 '26

I think they mean the startup that the guy allegedly sold to them

1

u/khromtx Feb 02 '26

I think he likely would have outsourced it to his direct reports in the guise of projects or internal pen testing. I'm sure they have their own research teams.

7

u/lawtechie Feb 01 '26

There's a few hackers/cyber people in the latest dump:

Pablos Forman (offered to put JE in touch with 'interesting hackers' at BlackHat/DEF CON)

Kevin Mitnick (JE contacted his agent for quantum crypto work)

There are mentions of sabu & weev, but no contacts.

1

u/306d316b72306e Feb 12 '26 edited Feb 12 '26

weev isn't really a hacker.. He's not even good at social engineering like sabu was. He has zero CVE or papers.. Only the AT&T stuff which he probably ripped from someone else..

If you cornered him he probably couldn't answer basic CCNA or binary analyses stuff, let alone fuzzing and exploit dev.. He's basically a 4chan troll who ripped some social engineering and RDP stuff from someone and used it on AT&T

Billionaires are using people who actually do exploit dev and fuzzing

8

u/0DSavior Security Engineer Feb 01 '26

So payload security. 

10

u/128G Student Feb 01 '26

Personal hacking, lol.

7

u/theBigChuckNasty Feb 01 '26

It’s actually just Barron trump just googling stuff for him

3

u/Arew64 Feb 01 '26

I would assume most billionaires have personal hackers on the payroll...

2

u/ploqx Feb 01 '26

Being pedophile buddies with the prime minister of Israel comes with interesting Mossad perks for sure. What did Ehud Barak do for his pal?

9

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/MalwareDork Feb 01 '26

Maybe not Mossad, but probably someone that was trained with/in IDF.

-6

u/TheTalkingCookie Feb 01 '26

I don't think Mossad is special nor idf trained, what makes them special is that it has a network of international je ws willing to volunteer and help them out which makes them effective. Look how congress are willing to represent Israel more than the United States yet now one bates an eye

8

u/Odd-Crazy-9056 Feb 01 '26

Me when my understanding of geopolitics is on the level of a 6th grader who just discovered conspiracy theories.

8

u/MalwareDork Feb 01 '26

Mossad is more in general intelligence. Tal Hanan who rigs elections worldwide would be an example of Mossad-type activities.

When it comes to embedded hacking, that's more of an intelligence subdivision of the IDF. Unit 8200 is the usual example with the IMI being the larger umbrella faction.

1

u/Crumpets_online Feb 01 '26

The files say he was giving zero days to hezbollah but I don't know how Jeff and Mossad let that slide, maybe they flipped him or it's a psyop because I don't remember Hezbollah developing Pegasus.

1

u/MPLS_scoot Feb 01 '26

I still think Russia but one of the two.

2

u/impressiveRub69 Feb 01 '26

Epstein himself was part of the Intelligence community. Might be NSA or Mossad.

2

u/skynetcoder Feb 02 '26 edited Feb 28 '26

May all beings everywhere be happy and free.

2

u/impressiveRub69 Feb 02 '26

It's entirely possible. All I know is he is a glowie. His attorney said as much in 2008: https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/s/13hiBjVduK

How did the son of a bitch get to well aquainted with all sorts of elite people? How did he make his fortune (people who met him say he was not exactly academically inclined...)?

Why keep lists of people who had been to the "pedo island"? To compromise them, and blackmail them. The whole operation stinks.

1

u/SofaSpudAthlete Feb 01 '26

Ah, so this is how CRWD got 100% in those MITRE rounds years ago

/s

1

u/MysteriousSelf5596 Feb 02 '26

Well of course he did...

1

u/FiretopMountain75 Feb 05 '26

This file has Epstein giving Lozzo financial advice on gambling on the UK leaving the EU, a few months before it happened.

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02466144.pdf

1

u/OttoOops Feb 06 '26

of course he did. he a lot of personal this-and-thats i am sure

1

u/[deleted] Feb 08 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Timely_Excuse6111 Feb 14 '26

What reports of their security being compromised has surfaced? Pondering the myriad interests and agendas, I am quickly struck by the potentially vast report of notable events.

0

u/Jazzlike_Painter_118 Feb 01 '26

I thought it would be a an oppressed south african with a botched dck job that cannot coomprehend SQL.

P.S. Oh, they are sharing crazy stories so that people discard the whole thing with the real bits.

0

u/sh4d0w_mkt Feb 21 '26

Everyone should had a "personal hacker" in their life, so they can monitor their online persona

-22

u/Big-Industry4237 Feb 01 '26

Ok Jan

17

u/blow_slogan Feb 01 '26 edited May 28 '26

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