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posted by janrinok on Wednesday February 07 2018, @11:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the colour-me-surprised-again dept.

Every few years, bugs known to affect all known version of Microsoft Windows turn up calling into question many claims from the lobbying giant regarding their software branch. The Inquirer is one of many sites reporting on recently leaked NSA tools which can target all versions of Windows from the past two decades. Althougth the emphasis in the article titles is on NSA, the exploits only make use of widely known holes in Microsoft systems which Microsoft often tells NSA about long before issuing an attempt at a patch. Their collaboration goes back for years, and even long before it was the first to join the NSA in kicking off the Prism program.

Researcher Sean Dillon from cybersecurity firm RiskSense tweaked the source code of three nicked NSA exploits - EternalSynergy, EternalChampion and EternalRomance - to work against Windows versions dating back as far as Windows 2000.

Windows machines taken over through these exploits are part of a large black market industry where compromised machines are bought, sold, traded, and fought over for the purposes of producing spam, launching distributed denial of service attacks, spreading further malware, ad click spoofing, manipulating polls and games, and many more illegal activities.

Source : https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3026129/leaked-nsa-hacking-tools-can-target-all-windows-versions-from-the-past-two-decades


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday February 08 2018, @08:19PM (1 child)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday February 08 2018, @08:19PM (#635171) Journal

    Ein reich, ein volk, ein fuhrer, eh? I've never heard that one before...

    --
    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Friday February 09 2018, @02:57AM

    by pdfernhout (5984) on Friday February 09 2018, @02:57AM (#635366) Homepage

    I heard it here: :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jth4yATniS4&feature=youtu.be&t=80 [youtube.com]

    (Indy film about Nazis on the Moon)

    --
    The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.