Zero-Day Vulnerabilities against Windows in the NSA Tools Released by the Shadow Brokers

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.

from Schneier on Security http://ift.tt/2v649cK

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