Shadow Brokers Exploit, What We Know Right Now
I spent a good portion of my Saturday radio show to talk about the latest release of NSA hacking tools by Shadow Brokers on Friday. These exploits are alleged to be able to be used against fully-patched Windows systems. Later in the day, Microsoft said that they had already patched many of the just-released exploits.
Scary times, no? There isn’t much coverage of any of the details in the media, which makes me think that sometimes the media just doesn’t report on things that they think might take too long for them to understand.
There is, however, some other information out there you can read to get an idea of what’s happening:
Most of the confusion about what has been patched seems to be stemming from the International Banking system, and its use of SWIFT for transaction interchange which was one of the vulnerabilities exposed Friday. Apparently, our NSA hacked all international banking transactions some time ago (which isn’t making any other country happy). Microsoft came out with a press release later on Friday saying that they had already patched the exploits that were released earlier in the day, but those patches appear to have only been associated with the SWIFT vulnerabilities.
At this point, it’s hard to say where the dust is going to settle. There still appears to be a high risk for Windows computers, however, for now, its thought that the biggest risks are to governments, military, and financial institutions. The risk for home and non-financial businesses appears to be low for now but will rise in a few weeks. Hopefully, by then, Microsoft will have patches out that will block most/all of these newly found vulnerabilities.
This hack is so important, that I’m going to keep you up-to-date on the developments.
Thanks for listening to my radio show/podcasts, and thanks for your question,
Craig.
