Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Submission Preview

No link to story available

Shadow Brokers Flaw Used in Ransomware

Accepted submission by butthurt at 2017-05-13 05:16:14
Security

butthurt [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Los Angeles Times reports [latimes.com] that a security bug in Microsoft Windows, made public when the Shadow Brokers [wikipedia.org] released exploits claimed to have been taken from the NSA, is being used in ransomware [wikipedia.org]. According to the story, a patch for the bug was released by Microsoft in March.

The Spanish government said several companies, including Telefonica, were targeted [...] a message that was purportedly sent to workers at Telefonica carried a subject line referencing a wire transfer and asked them to check a website for more details. That link — when launched on a Windows computer suffering from the vulnerability discovered by the NSA — unleashed the program that rendered files inaccessible.

As recently as last week, about 1.7 million computers connected to the Internet were susceptible to such an attack [...]

Among the organisations compromised by the ransomware were the UK's National Health Service and Russia's Interior Ministry.

related stories:
Windows Servers at Risk [UPDATED] [soylentnews.org]
"Shadow Brokers" Release the Rest of Their NSA Hacking Tools [soylentnews.org]
Former NSA Contractor May Have Stolen 75% of TAO's Elite Hacking Tools [soylentnews.org]
The Shadow Brokers Identify Hundreds of Targets Allegedly Hacked by the NSA [soylentnews.org]
NSA Contractor Accused of "Stealing" Terabytes of Information, Charged Under Espionage Act [soylentnews.org]
Probe of Leaked U.S. NSA Hacking Tools Examines Operative's `Mistake' [soylentnews.org]
Cisco Begins Patching an NSA Exploit Released by the Shadow Brokers [soylentnews.org]
NSA `Shadow Brokers' Hack Shows SpyWar With Kremlin is Turning Hot [soylentnews.org]
"The Shadow Brokers" Claim to Have Hacked NSA [soylentnews.org]

Original Submission