In late 1995 the CIA created a special working group to assess the agency’s readiness to utilize the web as an intelligence tool. The group’s principal finding was that the CIA was woefully underprepared for this brave new world. The same was true at the other intelligence agencies, who were even further behind, with significantly smaller budgets and few people on staff with the skills to find zero-days and code them into reliable exploits. A growing number of agencies started looking to buy their way into these capabilities.
