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by denzil_correa 3323 days ago
> Finally, this attack provides yet another example of why the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem. This is an emerging pattern in 2017. We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the CIA show up on WikiLeaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the NSA has affected customers around the world. Repeatedly, exploits in the hands of governments have leaked into the public domain and caused widespread damage. An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the U.S. military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen. And this most recent attack represents a completely unintended but disconcerting link between the two most serious forms of cybersecurity threats in the world today – nation-state action and organized criminal action

Did the Microsoft President just confirm that NSA develop the vulnerability which led to the attacks on hospitals this weekend?!

4 comments

"Did the Microsoft President just confirm that NSA develop the vulnerability "

Where did he do that? He said they found it and kept it for themself, but not that they injected it into Windows.

And about the whole thing, I would rephrase it to "many users learned the hard way about why are security-updates important".

But it is nice, that microsoft advocates a " digital genvue convention" even though I doubt anything will really change.

> An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the U.S. military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen

This is a bad analogy. The solution to people stealing your Tomahawks is to guard your goddamn bombs. A better analogy would be the U.S. military seeing Al Qaeda has a bunch of Tomahawks and doing nothing because they might be aimed at ISIS.

I thought that the NSA itself informed Microsoft after EnternalBlue was stolen?
This is public knowledge at this point.
Citation please?
The NSA hoarding / leaking aspect of this vulnerability has been reported by most major news outlets. Even the mainstream ones. Albeit most haven't expanded on that point to the level that Microsoft did here.
Sorry I misread it as the NSA was developing the holes as in backdoors, intentionally creating the vulnerability.
Effectively, that's what happened.
This (as far as I know) was one of hte first reports of details of the malware and clearly mentions it, and other analysts haven't said otherwise, which by now they would have if they disagreed: http://blog.talosintelligence.com/2017/05/wannacry.html