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After learning that one of its most prized hacking tools was stolen by a mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, National Security Agency officials warned Microsoft of the critical Windows vulnerability the tool exploited, according to a report published Tuesday by The Washington Post. The private disclosure led to a patch that was issued in March.
Those same NSA officials, according to Tuesday's report, failed to communicate the severity of the vulnerability to the outside world. A month after Microsoft released the patch, the Shadow Brokers published the attack code, code-named EternalBlue, that exploited the critical Windows vulnerability. A month after that, attackers used a modified version of EternalBlue to infect computers around the world with malware that blocked access to data. Within hours of the outbreak of the ransomware worm dubbed WCry, infected hospitals turned away patients; banks, telecommunications companies, and government agencies shut down computers.
"NSA identified a risk and communicated it to Microsoft, who put out an immediate patch," Mike McNerney, a former Pentagon cybersecurity official and a fellow at the Truman National Security Project, told The Washington Post. The problem, he said, is that no senior official took the step of shouting to the world: "This one is very serious, and we need to protect ourselves."
Source: ArsTechnica
(Score: 1) by Demena on Sunday May 21 2017, @11:19PM (11 children)
The prime responsibility for all the crap goes to there NSA not the Shadow brokers. They are both guilty as sin of unethical shit but the NSA made the door the Shadow Brokers used.
The NSA should be forking out to repair the worldwide damage. It isn't that they are no better than criminals it is simply that they are criminals.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 21 2017, @11:59PM (4 children)
No no, you see... imagine if there was a terrorist and a suitcase nuke and the terrorist locked his iPhone and demands a lawyer but there's a timer and we can't wait and it's New Year's Eve. You see?
(Score: 1) by Demena on Monday May 22 2017, @12:07AM (3 children)
No. I do not see.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 22 2017, @02:55AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @04:09AM (1 child)
And they're rebooting that shit, pretty sure the protagonist is a woman this time. Gotta get the diversity in there, can't let a silly thing like feminism stop the police state.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday May 22 2017, @04:22PM
Technically , in the US, a male is a minority*. So you should still be able to cast a man. LGBTBBQLOLBRBWTF man if you're still trying to fill the diversity quota.
*You'll have first trust Wikipedia, then second trust the 2012 CIA World Factbook, and third add up the numbers yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States#Ages [wikipedia.org]
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @01:14AM (5 children)
The prime responsibility for all the crap is Micro$oft for releasing a shitty operating system.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @02:04AM (3 children)
Look up ping of death as applicable to lunix. Yeah, RCE via ping, now sod off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @02:12AM (1 child)
My router will block that before it gets to my LAN... try again.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @06:58AM
No need to try again, because the same applies to this M$ asploit.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Chromium_One on Monday May 22 2017, @06:13AM
Seriously, people need to quit referring to Linux as Lunix. They really don't have much in common, though the 7-node clustering capabilities were kind of neat considering the hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LUnix [wikipedia.org]
When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday May 22 2017, @06:15AM
My feeling is Microsoft deliberately inserts backdoors presented to them by the TLA's in order to be a "team player" in exchange for adoption of Microsoft by government contractors, and favorable law regarding "hold harmless" clauses.
I have no proof of this, but having so many backdoors constantly being found and replaced sure leads me to speculate.
Seems like in any other industry, this far along, we would have had this whole thing nailed by now. We should at least have a trustworthy computational foundation by now. No, we still have stuff that falls apart.
Every successive version of Windows seems to be even more full of holes than the one it replaces.
Especially with our own government allowing "hold harmless" clauses to be OK, but not letting anyone else off nearly that easy.
The adoption of Microsoft by governments damn near mandates the adoption of the same by the citizens, so as to be able to talk to the governments. Just like we are forced to use the dollar as currency, as taxes are paid in it.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]