Inside the black market bug trade

The black market for software vulnerabilities is booming, with bugs regularly being sold for thousands of dollars a piece online. And one of the only ways to reduce this steady stream of hacks, according to Geekonomics author and IT security pro David Rice, is for software companies to simply write better code.

Speaking at this week's IT 360 show in Toronto, Rice took conference attendees into the underground vulnerabilities market, where hackers -- or anybody else with deep pockets for that matter -- can buy access to the latest unpatched security threats.

"The irony of this cyber space world is that attackers don't break in to anything," Rice, who also serves as the director for California-based security consultancy The Monterey Group, said. "There are an unknown number of broken windows in every piece of software out there today. They just find holes that the vendors failed to detect themselves."