Ok, this is month old news, but no thread on it, and the issue is still relevant considering that this is a story that is well over a five years in the making, posting a thread now.
In 2013, leaked documents by Edward Snowden showed that NSA had tools that allowed it unprecedented power of invasive surveillance across the world. The US government agreed to reveal the most damaging vulnerabilities to the technology companies. (Sidenote: CIA did not do so, and the tools it developed are catalogued in the Vault 7 leaks.)
A group calling themselves the ShadowBrokers stole some of these tools in 2016, and put them on auction. While security researchers believed the tools to be legit, there was not much interest in the auction. An anonymous troll executed a series of bitcoin transactions that rickrolled the shadowbrokers. The shadowbrokers then tried to sell the tools directly. When that failed, they just dumped the tools.
The mess was flagged as a major problem towards the end of 2016 itself, and tech news sites pointed out the serious repercussions what happens when zerodays hoarded by government agencies, and tools based on them, get into criminal hands.
One of the dumped exploits by the ShadowBrokers, was EternalBlue. Although Microsoft had already issued a patch, so it was not technically a zeroday, to major malware attacks in 2017 used this EternaBlue vulnerability. Petya, and WannaCry.
Last month, the US publicly blamed North Korea for the WannaCry ransomware attacks. Soon after, UK followed suit.
So, who should be blamed more here?
In 2013, leaked documents by Edward Snowden showed that NSA had tools that allowed it unprecedented power of invasive surveillance across the world. The US government agreed to reveal the most damaging vulnerabilities to the technology companies. (Sidenote: CIA did not do so, and the tools it developed are catalogued in the Vault 7 leaks.)
A group calling themselves the ShadowBrokers stole some of these tools in 2016, and put them on auction. While security researchers believed the tools to be legit, there was not much interest in the auction. An anonymous troll executed a series of bitcoin transactions that rickrolled the shadowbrokers. The shadowbrokers then tried to sell the tools directly. When that failed, they just dumped the tools.
The mess was flagged as a major problem towards the end of 2016 itself, and tech news sites pointed out the serious repercussions what happens when zerodays hoarded by government agencies, and tools based on them, get into criminal hands.
One of the dumped exploits by the ShadowBrokers, was EternalBlue. Although Microsoft had already issued a patch, so it was not technically a zeroday, to major malware attacks in 2017 used this EternaBlue vulnerability. Petya, and WannaCry.
Last month, the US publicly blamed North Korea for the WannaCry ransomware attacks. Soon after, UK followed suit.
So, who should be blamed more here?
