Slashdot Mirror
NSA-Leaking Shadow Brokers Just Dumped Its Most Damaging Release Yet (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Shadow Brokers -- the mysterious person or group that over the past eight months has leaked a gigabyte worth of the National Security Agency's weaponized software exploits -- just published its most significant release yet. Friday's dump contains potent exploits and hacking tools that target most versions of Microsoft Windows and evidence of sophisticated hacks on the SWIFT banking system of several banks across the world. Friday's release -- which came as much of the computing world was planning a long weekend to observe the Easter holiday -- contains close to 300 megabytes of materials the leakers said were stolen from the NSA. The contents (a convenient overview is here) included compiled binaries for exploits that targeted vulnerabilities in a long line of Windows operating systems, including Windows 8 and Windows 2012. It also included a framework dubbed Fuzzbunch, a tool that resembles the Metasploit hacking framework that loads the binaries into targeted networks. Independent security experts who reviewed the contents said it was without question the most damaging Shadow Brokers release to date. One of the Windows zero-days flagged by Hickey is dubbed Eternalblue. It exploits a remote code-execution bug in the latest version of Windows 2008 R2 using the server message block and NetBT protocols. Another hacking tool known as Eternalromance contains an easy-to-use interface and "slick" code. Hickey said it exploits Windows systems over TCP ports 445 and 139. The exact cause of the bug is still being identified. Friday's release contains several tools with the word "eternal" in their name that exploit previously unknown flaws in Windows desktops and servers.
The NSA has done nothing wrong. It's their duty to protect the United States by spying on threats to national security. Whoever is leaking this information needs to be on the receiving end of a drone strike.
I use Windows 10. The safest OS every made. Unbreakable.
The Shadow Brokers advertised the names of these exploits in January. The NSA had 3 months to warn Microsoft. But nope. Enjoy the 0day shitstorm that's about to drop.
And all the other nations are using the same exploits to spy on americans. Deal with that dumbass.
Preventing companies from repairing exploitable flaws in major software products is NOT something they should be doing.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
My uneducated guess would be that they would use it to follow the money.
Wow, this code is really old. Almost 10 years old. You can tell by the excessive use of XML.
It's their duty to protect their own goddam security and all Americans.
Given that they know millions of Americans are at risk from exploits they have not reported to the vendors, by your logic, the NSA is a traitor organization and qualifies for a drone strike.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
"This would make a lot of sense that the NSA compromise this specific SWIFT Service Bureau for Anti-money laundering (AML) reasons in order to retrieve ties with terrorists groups," Suiche wrote.
Sitting on a zero-day vulnerability without telling the maintainers certainly makes the USA less secure and runs afoul of their duty to protect the USA...
...But have they actually prevented a company from fixing exploits? Like a court order telling Microsoft to leave a vulnerability in place?
Anybody else wonder if Microsoft is cooperating with the NSA? Seems like there are a lot of security issues and I wonder why MS hasn't seemed to be able to find them and why the NSA has.
I wonder how many of this "unknown bugs" used by "slick code" where put there on purpose in windows and how much is actual bugs.
The other submission, which mods ignored, contained a better list of the exploits: https://www.bleepingcomputer.c...
TPFTDL: $52.06 billion in 2013, according to an imperfectly legitimate Edward Snowden release of government information.
Years removed from the lessons of Iran/Contra, governments have learned to just fund the cloak & dagger bunch... saves on eventual, inevitable, embarassment as you're employing folks who have proven eager to scam the funds they need clandestinely.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I'm glad I use Linux and not have to worry about these exploits and zero day attacks.
Hey, the NSA probably has more people working on breaking linux than we have working on building it. Be ready to apply updates when SB drops that tranche. Practice defense-in-depth.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
And why a certain foreign agent went to Korea a while back.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
C'mon, if you're going to hold yourself out as a professional propagandist, at least put in the effort to get your possessive pronoun number agreement correct.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Are you taking the piss? Or are you just naive?
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
I use kernel 4.8 so no nightmares here.
you must be new here
That sounds about right.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
> Much of the code was written when these machines were only networked if the company had a Novell network (yeah, yeah, both of you who ran LANMan can pipe down) and security wasn't even on the RADAR.
Indeed. Historically, it was DISK Operating System (DOS) on a PERSONAL Computer (PC) as opposed to the then-traditional NETWORK operating system on a time-sharing computer (which cost over $100,000). The point of DOS, the difference between Microsoft and what was already common place, was that the Microsoft OS was for cheap little computers used by one person, and not connected to a big corporate network. Instead of requiring many MBs of RAM, DOS could run in as little as 16KB pf RAM by getting rid of all the stuff that wasn't needed on a PERSONAL, DISK-based computer - stuff like security, stuff like isolating the files and processes of one user from the rest of the system.
This was a great idea. It worked brilliantly. Then the internet happened. Microsoft had a shit fit. Not only was their entire company based on PCs rather than the client-server model, but they had just spent millions upgrading Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), and named the new version COM. It was really cool - it let you do things like embed a picture in a Word document, or link a sound file from a picture. It was awesome. Then the web showed up with "img src" and "a href". Oh shit!
Microsoft did exactly the right thing, making an OS for personal, home computers, which weren't on a network and therefore any security was unnecessary overhead that they removed. Then the sudden popularity of the web screwed them and they had to play catch-up for 15 years.
Not "every linux kernel before 4.5". Whether a kernel is vulnerable depends on whether the bug was backported by distros. RHEL never backported it, and Debian quietly fixed it a good while ago (kernels of any version shipped Sep 2015 to Jan 2016)
http://www.zdnet.com/article/r...
Someone had to do it.
I think I'd prefer if the NSA *could* see those bank transactions. I'm not a fan of privacy in banking. If you want to do a transaction privately, that's what cash (and maybe cryptocurrency, that genie's out of the bottle) is for. Any privacy beyond that only provides enhanced convenience to criminals IMO. I'd prefer if all bank transactions were visible to law enforcement and tax authorities.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The US does not like France winning, so the US (with 5 eye friends) spy on every part of the French economy.
https://wikileaks.org/nsa-fran...
"French contract proposals or feasibility studies and negotiations for international sales or investments in major projects or systems of significant interest to the foreign host country or $200 million or more in sales and/or services, including financing information or projects of high interest... "
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
No kidding. Besides, how often do you get to use "It's its" in a sentence?
(Score: -1, Stupid)
They're monitoring transfers into and out of what appear to be primarily middle eastern banking institutions. This is a legitimate national security interest for the United States. It's helpful to see that (e.g.) Saudi Prince #1,804 is wiring money to AQAP principals or what have you.
This is exactly the sort of activity NSA is supposed to be engaging in, as opposed to trawling through every American's emails and credit card bills.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
I agree the US is corrupt. However - I do not agree with watching those French by breaking in their banking systems.
> The only reason systems like Linux were more secure (hard to say if they are overall now**) is they were part of the front line of attacks which meant a lot of the direct network facing stuff had to be patched ASAP
Remember iitially on Windows, any program run by any user was allowed to do anything and everything to the computer. Programs did in fact interact with the system, writing registry entries wherever they felt like, putting files in system directories, etc. You can't just suddenly prevent that out the blue - a large percentage of the existing software would stop working.
So Microsoft had to slowly transition away from that. Which put them behind, because before DOS, UNIX users were ALREADY accustomed to running as a non-root user. Most computer users before Microsoft didn't *have* root access - they had a terminal connected to a mainframe. They were accustomed to the idea that they ran their software within their private space, and the user software didn't need system-level access.
For quite some time, Windows users were essentially running their browsers as root - including Flash and Java. For some years after that, it *appeared* that they were running as some user, but under the hood there was no real security.
Linux comes from that Unix heritage, from the basic assumption that an individual user shouldn't be able to take down the system even if they tried.
Worry about what servers your Firefox web browser is settting up (SSDP) and why it needs to send out multicast broadcasts. Does your wifi router block those packets? Does it allow them to come in on your network? Why doesn't the menu option disable this feature? Apparently it's to provide competition to ChromeCast which allows you to stream the contents of your screen to other mobile devices across the Internet.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
you idiot, they are spying on innocent americans too. this is the early stages of a supranational surveillance system paid for by idiot whores like you.
"... the critical vulnerabilities for four exploits previously believed to be zerodays were patched in March, exactly one month before a group called Shadow Brokers published Friday's latest installment of weapons-grade attacks."
https://arstechnica.com/securi...
I agree, we should hit every one of their offices at the same time to minimize survivors, and while we're at it, hit the CIA at the same time.
All that money comes from the CIA.
Yeah! Beat Auburn! Roll Tide!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.