In Baltimore and Beyond, a Stolen NSA Tool Wreaks Havoc

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/us/nsa-hacking-tool-baltimore.html

by SREinSF • 7 years ago

375 151 7 years ago

tptacek18• 7 years ago

I'm unclear on why I'm meant to take this particular Windows SMB exploit so seriously when there's such a long history of comparable bugs that nobody ever referred to as "stolen cyber weapons". I think it might be almost entirely because of the name; "ETERNALBLUE" sounds much scarier than "CVE-2017-0144".

Don't get me wrong: a reliable modern Windows drive-by RCE is nothing to sneeze at. But if it wasn't this exploit, it'd be a different one --- will be a different one, likely not "stolen from NSA", when the next half-life of this bug is reached.

The phenomenon of a single bug having intense, distinctive utility is not new. In any couple of years, there will usually be a couple bugs like that --- a very popular RCE that's publicly known, and a very popular RCE that is somehow kept on the DL. Back when those RCEs were in things like UW IMAP, nobody wrote NYT stories about how the NSA had accidentally unleashed them on us like some filovirus from Zaire leaked from the CDC.

Meanwhile: seized on by North Korea, Russia, and China? Come on. We know roughly how much it costs to develop a reliable remote (Project Zero has written them up, what, a dozen times?). The smallest SIGINT agencies in the world can afford this kind of work out of petty cash. I'm sure none of them are going to look a gift bug in the mouth. But CVS-2017-0144 isn't fundamentally enabling them to do anything they couldn't have done themselves.

I think Mitre should just start assigning stupid NSA names to CVEs, so that people will take them more seriously.

spydum• 7 years ago

As much as people hate when vulnerabilities get sweet names like shell shock, heart bleed, dirty cow, and whatever else we come up with, you do have to admit that bit of marketing flare gets more eyeballs on it, and generally noticed and resolved much quicker. So I’m with you on this one: let’s get a marketing team embedded with mitre guys.. might actually be a solid win!

rtempaccount1• 7 years ago

Unfortunately there's diminishing marginal returns for "named" vulnerabilities.

There's nothing stopping people assigning scary names to quite mundane issues, and after a couple of "boy who cried wolf" episodes, people stop paying as much attention...

acqq• 7 years ago

I'm unclear on why I'm meant to take this particular Windows SMB exploit so seriously

the way I understand it, most of the affected, including the paper, take it seriously because it's their "tax money at work."

I understand also that somebody at the receiving end of the said money is not satisfied that that topic is raised.

tptacek18• 7 years ago

The tax money was spent enabling the NSA to hack into foreign computers, which is the SIGINT directorate's whole job. It sucks that their favorite bug got burned! It is a problem that it leaked, and developing a new pet bug ahead of schedule is an inefficient use of tax dollars. But NSA didn't make this bug, and it's not even unlikely that other people had it before it leaked, just in a different exploit package. Now that there's a reliable exploit attributable to NSA, everyone is going to use that one regardless.

jcims• 7 years ago

I fully agree with your position on the relative utility of this exploit vs any other.

However I do think there is benefit in looking at this as a portent of state-sponsored backdoors being inevitably stolen and used maliciously. If the NSA can’t protect their tools, who can?

FabHK• 7 years ago

Yes.

Incredibly, the German minister of the interior has recently announced his intention to force messengers like WhatsApp, Signal, etc. to decrypt messages when required by warrant.

Of course, they'll be able to control the backdoor better than the NSA, right. Right?

Only source in English I found quickly: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/german-minist...

wglb• 7 years ago

It is a journalistic and commentariat error to presume that such exploits are even faintly protectable. This requires being unclear on the concept on how these things work.

cstross• 7 years ago

It used to be the case during the Cold War that there was an unspoken, tacit understanding that assassination would not be used as a tool against the leadership of the great powers: assassins are cheap, so if it became established as a tool it would create a level playing field.

(There were exceptions, e.g. in the third world, but there was a big difference between a front-rank player (the USSR) murdering someone like Hafizullah Amin during the opening moves of an invasion, and something like the shootdown of Dag Hammarskjöld's plane during the Congo crisis: assassinating the UN Secretary General was a huge scandal at the time.)

Today, the use of weaponized CVEs by SIGINT agencies seems to have developed into a free-for-all: the big players were clueless about the potential for accidentally normalizing this practice, or the scale of the consequences as computers became ubiquitous and indispensable components of everything from hospital medicine carts to automobiles, and thereby leveled the playing field and quasi-legitimized it for non-state level actors.

And we're all going to be paying the price for at least a generation.

nostrademons• 7 years ago

I thought the big deal with EternalBlue is that the Shadow Brokers released the NSA's hacking trove as open-source, thus opening it up to all sorts of people with minimal technical skills. There's a big difference between having a zero-day but requiring the technical chops to turn it into a working exploit, and downloading a file off the Internet and running it.

There's this huge pandora's box about opening up state-level weaponry to the general public. Ultimately, it undermines the nation state as an organizing principle. And that's the world we live in now.

(For that matter, all these attacks are credited to Russia or North Korea or Iran - but do we actually have any evidence that that's who's behind them? Couldn't it just as easily be a teenager in his bed in upstate NY who has compromised a server in Russia? $100K in Bitcoin ransom is peanuts for a nation-state and would even be peanuts for a number of Silicon Valley techies on this site, but it's a lot of money to a high school kid.)

tptacek18• 7 years ago

I am not sure how you are getting from SIGINT to assassination. Since at least WW2, and almost certainly long before, there has been no tacit agreement that the great powers wouldn't spy on each other. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Is your argument instead that things like ransomware attacks are more akin to sabotage than to intelligence gathering? In that case, I'd suggest keeping two things in mind:

1. The one well-attributed case of state-level ransomware attacks was to North Korea, the norms-violating exception that somewhat proves the rule.

2. The majority of ransomware attacks are carried out by bona fide private actors unaffiliated with any state, and ransomware is also a part of our current norm, and has been for many years.

It will be interesting to see what happens when China shuts the power grid in Omaha, Nebraska off --- a capability they almost certainly have. The fact that you don't see things like that happening today suggests to me that the norm (I believe) you're referring to remains intact.

keyme• 7 years ago

The reason is that there's a big difference between an exploit and a fully weaponized utility that gives you a root shell for a given IP address.

You almost never see these lying around the Internet. There is a lot of work involved in creating a tool that'll successfully identify and exploit every single build of an executable, with 99.9% reliability. There is lots of testing to be done, lots of tweaks required. Things that random individuals just don't do by themselves.

dtornabene3• 7 years ago

but his point is that we're not talking about individuals. The article breathlessly goes on about foreign states, you know the bad ones, who have used this to attack all over the world. Except as tptacek points out, these states can do this kind of work on a slow day, in office. I actually disagree with tptacek, I don't think its partially, or even at all because of the name. I strikes me as more fear mongering, part of a narrative thats meant to drive more defense spending. "Look at all these breaches, can't have this stuff happening, be afraid lowly citizen, and support your security state".

closeparen3• 7 years ago

Isn’t Metasploit pretty close?

sp0rk• 7 years ago

You almost never see these lying around the Internet.

This may have been true 15 years ago when GitHub didn't exist and people hoarded their code, but I would say it's the exact opposite now. You'd be hard-pressed now to find a viable public exploit that doesn't have fully functioning PoC code available in multiple languages through a simple search of the CVE on GitHub.

stefan_• 7 years ago

You don't see the difference between a random bug and one that a state agency discovered, stockpiled, then misplaced, and in any case held secret?

I think you are just missing the entire discussion that this article is about.

tptacek18• 7 years ago

I do not, that is correct. Perhaps you could explain it to me.

tetha2• 7 years ago

To me it feels like a broader audience is starting to realize how much of an unlawful wild west the internet can be - and how much SIGINT and other entities abuse that. And how little preparations some networks have - networks with serious impacts when breached.

I'm working on the defensive side, so we can actively watch new exploits via HTTP being developed, assigned a CVE-ID and splatter on the IDP system on our application clusters in very large numbers. Others of our edge systems are under constant, automated, attacks even utilizing personal information about employees. It's kind of scary, but normal.

But now things are escalating into meatspace, if I may use that term. Norsk Hydro got hit with ransomware and only the engineers on site managed to avoid the loss of the entire smelting plants. Now we have an entire city hit hard enough to be seriously impacted.

Combine this actual impact end-users have with a flashy name from a secretive agency like the NSA, and of course that name gets used.

And I guess personally, if I have to tolerate flashy names in order to get broader awareness towards the importance of cyber security, I'm not that opposed.

closeparen3• 7 years ago

Do you think the malware authors know, care, or can even tell the nature of their victims? A Windows box is a Windows box, whether it is connected to my printer or an industrial control system.

userbinator• 7 years ago

Exploit or not, unpatched or not, having SMB accessible from the Internet --- which seems to be implied here --- is seriously stupid. MS has (reluctantly?) published most of their SMB protocol specs and the immense complexity is really disturbing. It's not a protocol I'd trust for use on anything other than a (wired) LAN where the communicating machines are already very trusting of each other.

jrochkind12• 7 years ago

According to three former N.S.A. operators who spoke on the condition of anonymity, analysts spent almost a year finding a flaw in Microsoft’s software and writing the code to target it.

So we spent significant government money finding and and developing an exploit for the CVE. Yes, someone else could have found it too/instead.

But what if instead, our government had spent that significant money finding the exploit... and getting it patched for everyone. Would that not have made us all safer?

We are choosing to fund an enormous "black hat" operation, when we could be funding an enormous "white hat" operation instead.

Theoretically, there is a government policy that it is the "default" to disclose any vulnerability found by national security, with a (secret of course) process to go through to argue that a vulnerability should instead be kept to be weaponized.

I am dubious to what extent that has actually changed practice at all. The times the vulnerabilities were kept undisclosed would of course be secret, but in theory all the times an NSA-discovered vulnerability was disclosed should be public record somewhere. I haven't seen such a list, not sure if anyone has tried to make one or if it's available at all. Theoretically the government policy is that disclosing vulnerabilities should be the standard and default behavior except in unusual circumstances. I am dubious. And it is putting us all at risk.

One month before the Shadow Brokers began dumping the agency’s tools online in 2017, the N.S.A. — aware of the breach — reached out to Microsoft and other tech companies to inform them of their software flaws. Microsoft released a patch, but hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide remain unprotected.

The scandal is that they tried to keep this vulnerability to themselves until they realized it had been stolen. If they had disclosed it to vendors when they found it, there would have been that many more years for patches to be distributed.

Instead they not only kept it secret in the vainglorious belief they had the power to keep it secret, but wrote the exploit that was then leaked, providing a powerful off the shelf exploit now available to anyone. Sure, someone else could have done that. But it was our tax dollars that actually did it. I'd rather have my tax dollars patching vulnerabilities than writing weaponized exploits for them.

tptacek18• 7 years ago

You're referring the the "vulnerability equities process" (VEP). I haven't read anything from anyone in the field that thinks the VEP is anything but a joke. In particular, the VEP's (many) skeptics point out that you can't use a vulnerability for a little while and then arrange to have it patched, because doing so makes it likely that your adversary will discover the systems you've broken into (simply by retrospectively looking through packet logs to see instances of the exploit running).

It comes down to this: either we're going to conduct adversarial signals intelligence like other major nations do, or we're not. If we are, we're going to stockpile exploits, because that's how modern SIGINT works.

I don't know anyone in the field, in the industry or academia, that thinks it's scandalous that NSA has vulnerabilities we haven't heard about.

belorn3• 7 years ago

if it wasn't this exploit, it'd be a different one --- will be a different one

It has been the go-to argument against regulations by the weapon industry that if we don't produce and sell the weapons then countries will just buy it from someone else. War and conflict will happen regardless where the purchased weapon was produced.

Bad actors will have a slight harder time if fewer people produced exploits and keep known vulnerabilities secret. If fewer people produce weapon the cost of war increase. Producing exploit will always have the cost of making it slightly easier for criminals to comit crime.

tptacek18• 7 years ago

And to think, all we ask in return is that the United States cease doing computer-based signals intelligence, while the rest of the world continues to do it. A small price to pay for making it slightly harder for criminals to commit crime!

corndoge• 7 years ago

But, exploits being produced or not doesn't change the fact that exploitable bugs exist in the first place. I would say it's preferable to have people making exploits so these bugs get patched sooner or later.

panarky• 7 years ago

The tool exploits a vulnerability in unpatched software

Eternal Blue exploits a vulnerability in unpatched Microsoft Windows software

mathieubordere• 7 years ago

shouldn't it be patched by now?

xena• 7 years ago

That doesn't mean people haven't been hurt before it was patched

lucb1e• 7 years ago

Elsewhere in the thread it is said to never even have been a zero day, i.e. before it was publicly released, Microsoft was forewarned and released a patch.

So yes, it is patched in the sense that the vendor did, and in the sense that the Microsoft customers should long, long have patched a vuln from 2017.

cf498• 7 years ago

is said to never even have been a zero day, i.e. before it was publicly released, Microsoft was forewarned and released a patch.

Which is nonsense. It was an exploit that was actively used for at least 5 years before Microsoft was informed about it. The "not a zeroday" is pretty close to doublespeak. There is nothing to sugarcoat here. It was a zeroday that was exploited for years and Microsoft wasnt informed until the very end. All the while millions of devices were vulnerable. I have to say I am having a hard time assuming good faith when people make such statements, here of all places.

A vulnerability is a zero day until the day the maker is informed about it. Its not an ambiguous definition.

xoa• 7 years ago

I think the national security establishment are applying pre-digital paradigms and thinking to cyberspace and as a result have gotten things almost entirely backwards. In the physical real world, "the best defense is a good offense" often has a lot of truth to it as in limited resources situations force concentration to defeat hostile forces can be fundamentally more effective. But when it comes to information which can be infinitely and losslessly copied it might make more sense to think of security in terms of information gradients and societal model. For a liberal democracy/market economy a lot of useful information gets generated, but it can be less effective at utilizing it and more leaky. Whereas (at least in examples so far in human history) centralized command authoritarian societies don't seem to as effectively come up with new stuff, but if offered the chance to take it from elsewhere can act with more of a long term vision (and of course with panopticons and massive restrictions on individual freedoms can more effectively insulate themselves).

So maybe from a strategic point of view government security should be working to shore up the weaknesses of the societal model while maximizing the strengths, the best strategy for each model are opposites. So for the USA, I think it'd be better if nobody had any ability to hack anything and the government acted aggressively to maintain an unequal information gradient. Then the problems that come from short term incentives, less decisive/unified responses, and so on continue to get made up for by a major technological edge. Whereas for a polity like China in a world where information is smoothed out they can leverage their authoritarian governance for more advantage.

Which means the NSA has been doing the opposite of what they should, because for America in the digital domain "the best offense is a good defense". America has the most to lose from having all of its information generation/infrastructure (R&D, networking/governing systems etc) get taken and/or disrupted. Rather then thinking of digital security issues as weapons to be exploited against less technologically advanced enemies who by definition have far less to lose, they should have long since been thinking of them as big strategic risks and working to eliminate all of them as aggressively as possible, and to be a dependable source for best practices in general. I think maybe there is a basic mindset mixup in the leadership given the last 50 years and their military backgrounds, and that's really caused America to squander enormous amounts of strategic value (and goodwill as well for that matter). Very foolish and unfortunate, and I'm not sure if anyone in government is currently thinking about reworking the NSA into a role focused on actual national security.

pcnix2• 7 years ago

This is a very interesting take on the road we should have taken with respect to cybersecurity. I agree with what you said, but I think there's still scope for this sort of thinking in current nation states. It's a strategic mistake, but one that a generation more in touch with technology would probably not make as easily, so I expect that there's already people thinking this way in most governments, and that will only increase in the future.

rossdavidh• 7 years ago

You are absolutely correct, and the mindset change you describe will happen. However, and unfortunately, it will require some Pearl Harbor or 9/11 sized catastrophe, to make that point clear to everyone who needs to understand it.

natch4• 7 years ago

“We can’t protect our own dangerous secret software tools, but trust us to protect your keys in escrow.”

Godel_unicode• 7 years ago

You don't see a difference in protection posture between something which has to be used in the wild vs something which could be kept in a vault for it's entire lifetime? I'm not arguing that escrow is a good idea, I'm arguing that this argument is not why that's true.

Edit: consider how often keymat has leaked.

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

There isn't one really - if they had access to it the same logistical issues would come up no matter how much they pinky promise not to abuse it. The more it spreads the more vulnerable it is

The only way key escrow would be remotely trustworthy would be if there were "hostages" to provide an intrinsic punishment for their failures or stonewalling of transparency.

natch4• 7 years ago

You really think the keys will stay in a vault?

And you think this because you have assurances from who? The NSA? Xi Jinping? MBS? Kim Jung Un? Diane Feinstein? Donald Trump? RSA Inc.? NIST? David Sternlight?

PeterisP3• 7 years ago

I mean, there is a big difference - you have to directly send your exploits to the enemy so that they'd work; you don't have to send any escrowed keys to them.

natch4• 7 years ago

The enemy will have escrowed keys too.

But see my answer to Gödel_unicode.

natch4• 7 years ago

Fun fact, the need for NSA exploits to be installed on an “enemy” (target) device had nothing to do with how they were leaked in this case.

And stuff kept in vaults can be leaked too.

Sure the two things are different but the dynamics are the same. Information wants to be free, and it leaks.

Your argument can be turned around as well. The NSA tools were meant for use by a small specialized team under strict controls. Whereas key escrow has been put forward as a solution that would allow any podunk sheriff in any jurisdiction to apply for access to decrypt private information anywhere... virtually guaranteeing compromise with poor security practices, unlike what would be expected for the NSA tools.

sschueller• 7 years ago

This is on the NSA. They decided not the tell the vendors about this and that makes them responsible. They failed their task which I thought was to keep the Unites States safe and secure.

pcnix2• 7 years ago

They did tell the vendors about this, and the vendors actually released a patch too, all this before the tools were leaked.

dubbel3• 7 years ago

The patch was released just one month before the exploits were leaked to the public, and the NSA only decided to act after they were certain that their tools had been extracted. But we still don't know when it was extracted from the NSA. If they would have brought this to Microsofts attention 5 years earlier (and without releasing an easily adaptable exploit for the vulnerability) a lot of damage could have been avoided.

sneak2• 7 years ago

*leaked publicly.

No telling how many people got copies or packet captures from its use in the YEARS it existed prior to it being patched.

peterkelly• 7 years ago

Five years after the NSA discovered it.

NikolaeVarius2• 7 years ago

https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1132345806177144833

Some interesting rebuttal notes. Apparently it is the vulnerability that is being exploited, not eternalblue itself.

dtornabene3• 7 years ago

interesting! thanks for linking that

thinkling• 7 years ago

I find one of the responses pretty compelling:

This is a distinction without meaning. Infosec frequently uses the same name to refer to a vulnerability and a corresponding exploit. I don't agree with the framing of the story either, but calling it "fake news" is a serious accusation that goes too far.

https://twitter.com/mehaase/status/1132366433491533824

NikolaeVarius2• 7 years ago

I'm less interested in the accusations and more about the content.

mediocrejoker• 7 years ago

Digging into this a bit more and reading between the lines of the nytimes article, it sounds to me like EternalBlue was indeed used as part of the attack chain, for lateral movement. It was not the only exploit used, nor would the attack have been wholly prevented without it.

https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/113232602124240076...

votepaunchy• 7 years ago

NYT again buried the lede. This was never a 0-day. How is it that companies and governments still fail to install updates years later?!?

“One month before the Shadow Brokers began dumping the agency’s tools online in 2017, the N.S.A. — aware of the breach — reached out to Microsoft and other tech companies to inform them of their software flaws. Microsoft released a patch, but hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide remain unprotected.”

jorblumesea3• 7 years ago

Yeah, this speaks more to the incompetence of local government than it does any kind of intelligence agency. Although the normalization of exploiting CVEs is a worrying trend.

dubbel3• 7 years ago

Of course it was a 0-day. It was one until the day that Microsoft released patch MS17-010 on the 12th of March 2017. So for around 5 years it was a 0-day that was used by the NSA and possibly other unknown actors.

azernik2• 7 years ago

0-day generally refers to the day the vulnerable party learns of the vulnerability, so it would be substantially earlier.

HillaryBriss• 7 years ago

i kind of agree. but then again, in today's climate, is failing to install updates really a lede? i mean people have been not installing updates in a timely manner for decades now.

joe_the_user2• 7 years ago

Baltimore is one of the poorest and most dysfunctional cities in the US. I don't know the details but it seems logical that a place like this would be where the servers wind-up not updated.

The critique I'd make of the NSA isn't that they developed this tool but that they spent time constructed the tool instead of time spent actually securing American infrastructure.

MaxfordAndSons• 7 years ago

securing American infrastructure

That's not their job though, is it? I'm not sure whose job it is, maybe the DHS or something like that. Admittedly their name might make you think it is, but I wouldn't expect a governmental agency to ever do anything but it's mandated job.

olliej• 7 years ago

I feel that given the US government prosecution of the MalwareTech guy for use of an exploit package he wrote, but was not using, the US government should accept financial responsibility for the misuse of their own exploit.

ne9xt• 7 years ago

I just want to mention how Tim Cook rightfully pushed back on government pressure to develop a tool to break into an accused terrorist’s iphone, citing the dangerous precident it would set, as well as the enevitable theft of said tool. if the NSA can’t fully secure its arsenal, who are they (government) to demand a private company to develop (and expect to secure) a tool that _everyone_ would want to get their hands on. alas, while the effort was noble, state sponsored actors have made this a moot point.

oconnor6632• 7 years ago

“If Toyota makes pickup trucks and someone takes a pickup truck, welds an explosive device onto the front, crashes it through a perimeter and into a crowd of people, is that Toyota’s responsibility?” he asked. “The N.S.A. wrote an exploit that was never designed to do what was done.”

Let's rework that analogy. If the NSA knows a trick to make Toyota pickup trucks explode, and they don't tell Toyota about the trick for years because they want to keep using it, and then eventually they leak the trick and suddenly everyone's Toyotas are exploding left and right, is that the NSA's fault?

Yes, yes it sure is.

I wouldn't go quite so far as to say the NSA was obligated to tell Microsoft (metaphorical Toyota) immediately about the exploit. For better or worse it's in America's interest for them to hack into foreign computers, and they take some risks as part of doing that. But they're 100% responsible for the downside of the risks they take.

tedunangst• 7 years ago

Imagine Toyota makes a faulty truck, and then they issue a recall, and there's headline news about the danger this issue poses, and truck drivers all over Twitter are pleading for people to fix their trucks, but you nevertheless continue driving around for 799 days without fixing it, and then your truck explodes. I know who I'm blaming.

oconnor6632• 7 years ago

Both points are true. Think about having giant holes in the sidewalk. On the one hand, if you walk into a giant hole in the sidewalk in broad daylight, that's pretty much your fault, and your friends will laugh at you. On the other hand, everyone understands that some people will inevitably walk into a giant hole in the sidewalk if it's there, and so we consider it negligent to dig one without putting up bright orange barriers around it. In part that's because some people are more vulnerable than others (maybe it's nighttime, maybe their eyesight isn't very good, maybe they're going fast on a bicycle), and in part that's because with a large enough group of people some of them are bound to be careless, distracted, or unlucky.

phjesusthatguy3• 7 years ago

Microsoft built the truck, the NSA welded the bomb on the front, and then allowed that weaponized truck to be stolen off their parking lot.

Bendingo• 7 years ago

Best analogy so far +1

mirimir3• 7 years ago

EternalBlue was so valuable, former N.S.A. employees said, that the agency never seriously considered alerting Microsoft about the vulnerabilities, and held on to it for more than five years before the breach forced its hand.

This has been common "conspiracy theory" for at least a decade. And not just about Microsoft.

wyclif• 7 years ago

Slightly off-topic, but does anyone know who makes those standing desks shown in the pic of the MSFT office?

dead_mall• 7 years ago

Wreaking havoc on outdated computers...

OliverJones• 7 years ago

You know what's bizarre? Amidst all this drumbeat of news about cybercrime trashing government, and with the clear evidence that the US 2016 turned, at least partially, on cybercrime:

NOT ONE of the candidates for US President has undertaken any effort to boost their own infosec. (Or if they have, they keep it quiet.)

What can they do? The same stuff we do in any SaaS business:

Rudimentary security training for everybody, including bigshots and candidates. (Podesta got phished, twice!)

Make sure their laptops and office computer equipment are up to patch levels and the malware detectors work.

Engage one of the large-scale email providers; they have topnotch dedicated infosec people, good spam traps, and a lot to lose if they visibly mess up.

Adopt strong multifactor authentication.

Hire compentent pentesters and remediate any vulnerabilities they find, fast.

Let their donors and the public know they're taking action (not WHAT action of course, just that they're on it.)

Governments should do the same for their constituents and taxpayers.

Now, maybe candidates will argue they don't have time for the extra security. But, in 2019, that argument shows they're unfit for public office. One candidate learned that the hard way in 2016. No more of this.

davidf18• 7 years ago

Two years ago, in 2017, Microsoft distributed the security update to fix this problem. The issue has nothing to do with the NSA and everything to do with the City of Baltimore failing to keep their capital equipment, in this case computers, up-to-date applying security and other updates.

The article also discuses healthcare systems hacked by other exploits. This again was not caused by the computer virus, but by the fact that Microsoft vendor issued security updates were not applied to the systems.

Often there are security upgrades in hardware as well as software which means that the computer hardware needs to be upgraded as well.

As is the case with most of these security hacks, it is the failure of the agency to budget appropriately for equipment maintenance and having competent leadership that actually understands the importance of budgeting for and implementing security upgrades including upgrading to the latest version of the OS, in this case, Windows 10.

redleggedfrog• 7 years ago

"The tool exploits a vulnerability in unpatched software..."

It's a self inflicted wound by Baltimore.

Question is, what is the cost of actually maintaining their systems competently vs. the cost of the attack? Both are difficult to quantify, but if you factor in the likelihood of getting attacked I bet it's still cheaper in the long run to just run your IT dept fast and loose and let the chips fall where they may.

As a government entity, they are probably making the soundest decision based on budget. Disruption in services hurts the populace, not the government.

As an anecdotal aside, I once worked as a contractor for over a year for a state government entity, run by a young, ambitious, dept head who was all about the security and soundness of the software they used. But he needed a good sized budget, to convert buggy and insecure systems over to something more sound, and every single meeting with his superiors was about money. He argued so vehemently (I was in some of these meetings and he couldn't have been any more astute in his observations on the future of attacks) that eventually his superiors found a reason to fire him (using government bought software for personal use at home - for self education). And, no joke, literally all the work he and his team had done in the dept for years was just chucked when the next guy came in.

Government is about money, not security.

AdamM12• 7 years ago

One thing I didn't realize till I talked to someone who works in IT procurement for a populous county in KC was that they can capitalize buying servers, and finance via bonds, vs. using cloud providers, which comes out of their operational budget.

Sephr• 7 years ago

The Shadowbrokers announced their access to EternalBlue many months before Microsoft released a patch.

The NSA was negligent in not immediately informing Microsoft after the Shadowbrokers announced their access to the NSA tools with clear proof (codenames, etc) on Reddit.

HocusLocus• 7 years ago

Bed, Bath, Baltimore and Beyond

NSA knew that EternalBlue was in the wild and possibly being used by other bad state actors, and just sat on it. For years. In case you are wondering whose side they're on.

In Baltimore and Beyond, a Stolen NSA Tool Wreaks Havoc

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