Cyberattack thrusts focus on spy agency
scenario with conventional weapons would be the US military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen.”
Some major technology companies, including Google and Facebook, declined to comment on the statement.
But some other technology industry executives said privately that it reflected a widely held view in Silicon Valley that the US government is too willing to jeopardize internet security in order to preserve offensive cyber capabilities.
The NSA did not respond to requests for comment.
Espionage
The NSA and other intelligence services generally aim to balance disclosing software flaws they unearth against keeping them secret for espionage and cyber warfare purposes.
On Monday, senior administration officials defended the government’s handling of software flaws, without confirming the NSA link to WannaCry, the tool used in the global ransomware attack.
“The United States, more than probably any other country, is extremely careful with their processes about how they handle any vulnerabilities that they’re aware of,” Tom Bossert, the White House homeland security adviser, said at a news briefing on Monday.
Other tools from the presumed NSA toolkit published by the Shadow Brokers have also been repurposed by criminals and are being sold on underground forums, researchers said. But they appear to be less damaging than WannaCry. It is not known who is behind the Shadow Brokers.
Derek Manky, global security strategist at cybersecurity firm Fortinet, said he thinks WannaCry is probably the worst that will come from the Shadow Brokers’ publicly dumped toolkit, though the group may have held back from publicly revealing everything it obtained
“Out of that batch, it is probably a high-water mark,” Manky said.
Security experts said the NSA had engaged in responsible disclosure by informing Microsoft of the flaw at some point after learning it had $70,000 paid over ransomware
Less than $70,000 has been paid in a widespread ransomware cyberattack that has affected about 150 countries worldwide, the White House said on Monday. “We are not aware of payments that have led to any data recovery,” White House Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert said at a daily news conference.
Bossert said the ransomware attack has infect- ed more than 300,000 machines but the good news is “the infection rates have slowed over the weekend”.
Specially, no US federal systems are affected, he said.
Bossert said the ransomware has three variants but patching systems can help protest against all these variants.
been stolen and a month before the tools leaked online.
Users who do not patch their systems and the Shadow Brokers were more directly responsible for the attack than the NSA, they said.
The Department of Homeland Security began an “aggressive awareness campaign” to alert industry partners to the importance of installing the Microsoft patch shortly after it was released in March, an agency official working on the attack said.
“This one, we knew it could be a problem,” the official said.
“NSA should be embarrassed — they’ve had a lot of damaging leaks,” said James Lewis, a former US official who is now a cyber expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Still, he said, “Microsoft needs to admit that the 20th century is over, it’s a much more hostile environment, and that hobbling the NSA won’t make us any safer.”