[2017-05-15] Security Experts and Microsoft Question the NSA’s Overreach

[jamie.redman1]

On Friday, May 12 the Wanacryptor 2.0 (Wannacry) ransomware began spreading like wildfire across thousands of computers across the world. Over the past two days Wannacry has claimed over 223,000 victims using Windows operating systems through an alleged U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) exploit called an SMB worm.

According to various reports from security groups and tech publications, the Wannacry malware has spread to over 223,000 infections globally. It is purported that the ransomware uses a protocol called an SMB worm which is claimed to be a modified version of the NSA’s “Eternal Blue” exploit leaked by the Shadow Brokers. This weekend Microsoft has released another set of patches to fix XP and Windows 8 operating systems as it had previously published a patch for other versions this past March.

Read More Here >>> https://news.bitcoin.com/security-exper ... overreach/

[Rmcdermott927]

It's not amazing to me that these exploits exist, what amazes me is that they were kept secret for so long without being discovered by other sources.


This is scary stuff, especially considering no tool currently exists to decrypt files encrypted with this worm yet.