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Submitted via IRC for SoyCow3941
An unidentified hacker group appears to have accidentally exposed two fully-working zero-days when they've uploaded a weaponized PDF file to a public malware scanning engine.
The zero-days where[sic] spotted by security researchers from Slovak antivirus vendor ESET, who reported the issues to Adobe and Microsoft, which in turn, had them patched within two months.
Anton Cherepanov, the ESET researcher who spotted the zero-days hidden inside the sea of malware samples, believes he caught the zero-days while the mysterious hacker(s) were still working on fine-tuning their exploits.
"The sample does not contain a final payload, which may suggest that it was caught during its early development stages," Cherepanov said.
The two zero-days are CVE-2018-4990, affecting Adobe's Acrobat/Reader PDF viewer, and CVE-2018-8120, affecting the Win32k component of Windows.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @12:14PM (4 children)
And NSA grace time, so they can take advantage for a while.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @02:39PM
NSA has probably known about these issues for a long time, perhaps since their inception. Ditto other similar agencies. And proprietary software vendors just love calling any bug a zero day, it's pretty hard for the rest of us to prove otherwise...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @05:44PM (2 children)
It's so weird that there is this idea that the US government has some kind of cooperation to get security holes. Sometimes the claim is purposely unpatched holes, and other times the claim is intentional backdoor access that the government forces or purchases.
Come on, seriously... those companies are full of foreigners and unpatriotic leftists. They can't be trusted.
I get $150,000 per year in a cheap location (like $300,000 per year in San Francisco) to make shit happen. We do things the hard way, same as probably every country that isn't China. If the government wants to hack into something, they pay millions of dollars for a team of people like me to think real hard. If a team of 5 works for 4000 hours while billing $200/hour (allowing overhead costs) then that is $4 million.
I'm very glad there are no backdoors. That'd put my company out of business.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @05:59PM (1 child)
If you're telling the truth, you're scum who should be killed.
If you're lying, you're scum who should be killed.
Kill yourself and save us the trouble.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @06:36PM
We provide a needed service. We charge the market rate; feel free to bid on the contracts if you think you can do it cheaper.
Throwing a $billion at this stuff is enough for hundreds of 0-day exploits. That is pocket change for the US government.
Stuxnet is a great example. It had multiple 0-day exploits and some extra code. All together, it probably went for $50 million. It set back Iran's nuclear weapons program by years. That was a bargain.
People may have died because of my work. I like that.