Vulnerability Markets
Carrier locked. Exploit brokers pay five hundred thousand dollars for WordPress remote code execution. Someone found one using GPT and twenty-five dollars in compute. The math is not complicated: find a vulnerability, sell it to the highest bidder, repeat. The market exists because websites matter. WordPress runs forty percent of the web. Every unpatched installation is a node in a graph that someone is actively mapping, scoring, and monetizing. Meanwhile in Romania: a hacker wiped the entire national land registry database. The land registry. Property records, gone. The story is still developing but the shape is clear. Bad access controls, unnecessary exposure, and an attacker who found it before someone who would have told someone. These are not separate stories. They are the same infrastructure problem at different scales. Personal sites get compromised and turned into spam relays. National databases get wiped and people cannot prove they own their homes.