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by bitexploder 3287 days ago
The private symbols in these builds could actually be very useful. The article alluded there were private symbols. So, even if only 1% of the overall windows code was leaked, if there were, say private symbols for the heap allocator of the kernel, for a practiced reverse engineer that is pure gold. Not as good as code, but a hell of a lot better than having to figure everything out and name functions and symbols themselves.
1 comments

What kinds of private symbols aren't served by the symbol server?
All of them. The server serves public symbols. Private symbols have structure info and even local variable names, which are very useful.
There are two levels of debugging symbols. One is released with every Windows build, for end-users reporting back stack traces and the like. These are of the second more granular level - private debugging symbols available to developers only.