Crack our 'military-grade' email encryption and we'll give you 5% of our firm

Vulnerability testing is commonplace these days, and a lucrative business for some, but a Hungarian biz is offering an unusual prize for anyone who manages to crack its email encryption system – a five per cent stake in the company. The upstart, MySecureZone, has spent the last 22 months potting together a browser-based …

[Graham Marsden]

How much...

... does a length of rubber hose cost...?

[Anonymous Coward]

what's 5% of bugger all ?

If I crack their encryption they'll be worth a lot less .. so not as big an inducement as it might seem.

[Cliff]

Re: what's 5% of bugger all ?

Quite - Why own 5% of a company with broken encryption?

I guess if they do other cool stuff it could be worth it, otherwise just see what their competitors are offering for the chance to steal all their contracts...!

[Marvin the Martian]

Or: Why 5%?

Is it because the other 95% is in NSA hands?

[Jamie Jones]

In other news.....

"NSA aquires 5% stake in Hungarian startup"

More seriously, whilst I realise that a PR company probably released the story, it did seem awfully fluffy and full of buzzwords to me...

[Kevin McMurtrie]

The challenge comes later

Any fool can encrypt a single e-mail so that it can never be cracked. You don't even need a computer. The attack is always against the services and operations of a company, which can become nearly infinitely complex and very difficult to perfectly secure. Would a hacker find 5% of the company to be more valuable than secretly maintaining access? I guess it depends on how many hackers have already claimed their 5%.

[Lyle Dietz]

Makes sense

If you collect the 5% stake in the company, it is then in your interest to improve the value of that company. You'd start offering suggestions on how to improve things, and seeing as you had sufficient knowledge on how to break it originally, these suggestions would actually be worth something.

[Jamie Jones]

Re: Makes sense

..... So making your 5% stake more beneficial to them than to you!

A nice way to aquire an expert consultant!

[Anonymous Coward]

So the first 10 crackers will get to own the company and presumably keep very quiet about the encryption flaws.

[Anonymous Coward]

So if I crack the encryption and do the same with 19 more fake identities I can own a soon to be defunct company, great.