Did a renowned hacker help Jeffrey Epstein get ‘dirt on other people’?
On Dec 1, 2018, Vincenzo Iozzo, a world-renowned hacker, sent an email asking whether he should try to conceal his identity when he arrived at an upcoming meeting with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“I have an odd question for you: is there a lot of press around the house given recent news?” Iozzo asked an Epstein associate. “Trying to decide whether to wear a baseball hat :).”
Three days earlier, The Miami Herald had reported that Epstein received an “extraordinary plea agreement” in 2008 that helped conceal the full extent of his crimes for more than a decade.
In response to Iozzo’s inquiry, the Epstein associate, whose name is redacted, suggested that a disguise was preferable when arriving at the sex offender’s New York home.
“I did not see any yesterday but one never knows with what is swirling around,” Epstein’s associate said, regarding the possible presence of reporters or photographers. “Glasses, hat, scarf. Go for it.”
Seven months later, federal officials arrested Epstein on federal sex trafficking charges. A month after his arrest, in August 2019, Epstein was found dead in his jail cell. Investigators said Epstein died by suicide.
The exact nature of the relationship between Iozzo and Epstein remains a mystery. It is not clear, for instance, whether Epstein sought Iozzo’s help in hacking into computers or cellphones to gather information on friends or foes. However, an informant told the FBI in 2017 that Epstein “had dirt on other people.”
Iozzo, now CEO of SlashID, an identity security firm, did not respond to repeated requests for comment from Straight Arrow News.
But documents released by the Department of Justice about investigations into Epstein show that Iozzo was a presence in the disgraced financier’s world for at least four years in the 2010s, a period between Epstein’s first conviction on sex-related charges and the arrest that preceded the end of his sex trafficking schemes and of his life.
‘You should connect’
Iozzo appears to have first been introduced to Epstein over email on May 6, 2014 by Joichi Ito, then the head of the MIT Media Lab. In 2019, Ito resigned from MIT following revelations that he had accepted donations from Epstein. In 2014, Ito told Epstein that Iozzo was “one of the best network security guys I know.”
Ito did not respond to SAN’s request for comment.
The security community already knew Iozzo well. In 2010, he and another security researcher became the first people to publicly hack the iPhone. The following year, Iozzo and two others followed up on their groundbreaking work by hacking the BlackBerry device as well.
“He’s in NYC often,” Ito wrote to Epstein. “If you have time, you should connect. I think you’ll enjoy meeting each other and I also think this business idea that we’re working on might be interesting for you as well.”
Iozzo responded in the email thread by asking Epstein whether he’d be available to meet between May 11 and May 19. Epstein didn’t respond.
Eight days later, Iozzo tried again.
“Jeffrey, Joi tells me you’re in NY the 18th and the 19th,” the hacker wrote, asking whether the 18th would work for a face-to-face.
“Yes,” Epstein responded.
The meeting on the 18th appears to have gone through. That day, Iozzo told one of Epstein’s associates that he was “in a cab headed there.”
Emails over the next four years detail attempts, primarily by Iozzo, to set up meetings with Epstein. Only a handful of emails reveal the topics they planned to discuss. But on July 25, 2016, Iozzo told Lesley Groff, Epstein’s executive assistant, that he needed five to six hours with Epstein and an additional one to two hours with her and “the girls.”
When asked what the meetings would entail, Iozzo told Groff that he and Epstein had discussed having him teach cybersecurity practices to people in the financier’s immediate orbit.
“So the meeting is like a ‘safety briefing’ type of thing if that makes sense?” Iozzo wrote.
Iozzo went on to say he believed there should be a “slightly different setup” between Epstein and Groff and the unnamed “girls.” He did not elaborate.
‘Personal hacker’
By 2017, Iozzo and Epstein’s relationship appears to have caught the FBI’s attention. A document — published in the Justice Department’s latest release of files on Epstein last Friday — reveals a meeting between two special agents and a confidential source on Nov. 27, 2017.
The informant alleged that Epstein had a “personal hacker” whose name is redacted but is described as “an Italian citizen born in Calabria who developed zero-day exploits and offensive cyber tools and sold the tools to governments. …” That description matches Iozzo.
The document further says Epstein’s alleged hacker was “known as the first person to hack and find vulnerabilities in Blackberries and iOS,” two accomplishments publicly attributed to Iozzo.
The informant also told FBI agents that Epstein’s hacker worked for the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike after it acquired a company he owned in 2017. Iozzo’s LinkedIn profile says CrowdStrike acquired his company, IperLane, that same year.
The FBI document also says that Epstein’s hacker lived in Dubai at one time and was acquainted with an individual whose name is redacted. In an April 21, 2015, email, Iozzo tells Epstein that he’s “relocating to Dubai in mid May” before extending an invitation: “if you’ve never been and want to visit, let me know — there’s a guy (a member of the Royal family or something) who you might like.”
On Aug. 2, 2015, Iozzo even invited Epstein to attend the annual Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas. Iozzo, according to his LinkedIn profile, has been a board member of the event since 2011. Black Hat did not respond to repeated inquiries from SAN about its relationship with Iozzo.
The hacker’s inclusion in the Epstein files has already caused some of the hacker’s former employers to speak out.
In a statement to SAN, a CrowdStrike spokesperson said Iozzo hasn’t been with the company since 2021.
On X, Dan Guido, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits, where Iozzo began working in 2012, responded by saying the pair had gone separate ways “very early on because we had wildly different ideas for how to run the company … which should be apparent from these email leaks.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
