The Russian government plans to invest almost 9 million dollars in the search for IT vulnerabilities, which it might put to its own use

The Russian government is planning to allocate 500 million rubles ($8.9 million) to a search for IT vulnerabilities, according to a new report by the newspaper Vedomosti about Moscow’s digital economy program.

The work has been delegated to the Competence Center for Import Substitution in the Information-Computer Technologies Field, which will look for security flaws in both government and private systems. Experts told Vedomosti that any vulnerabilities discovered in the research could be used for “government purposes.”

The “Competence Center” was created in 2016 by Vladimir Putin’s executive order and charged with “monitoring the purchases of state agencies and enterprises for the use of domestic software and hardware.” Internet giants, like Google, Facebook, and Apple, run their own vulnerability reward programs, and information about major security flaws fetches tens of millions of dollars on the black market.