Zero-Day Vulnerabilities against Windows in the NSA Tools Released by the Shadow Brokers
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In April, the Shadow Brokers—presumably Russia—released a batch of Windows exploits from what is presumably the NSA. Included in that release were eight different Windows vulnerabilities. Given a presumed theft date of the data as sometime between 2012 and 2013—based on timestamps of the documents and the limited Windows 8 support of the tools:
- Three were already patched by Microsoft. That is, they were not zero days, and could only be used against unpatched targets. They are EMERALDTHREAD, EDUCATEDSCHOLAR, and ECLIPSEDWING.
- One was discovered to have been used in the wild and patched in 2014: ESKIMOROLL.
- Four were only patched when the NSA informed Microsoft about them in early 2017: ETERNALBLUE, ETERNALSYNERGY, ETERNALROMANCE, and ETERNALCHAMPION.
So of the five serious zero-day vulnerabilities against Windows in the NSA’s pocket, four were never independently discovered. This isn’t new news, but I haven’t seen this summary before.
Tags: exploits, Microsoft, NSA, patching, Russia, vulnerabilities, Windows, zero-day
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Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/07/zero-day_vulner.html