The NSA hoards vulnerabilities for the same reason
the military has guns.
Vulnerabilities are fundamentally unlike guns.Because vulnerabilities can be independently discovered or accidentally released, then reproduced in vast quantities and used against the public and civilian infrastructure of both us and our allies - largely with impunity.
If wannacry was a gun, it'd be a gun that fired backwards and sideways at the same time as forwards, and you can't stop it firing once it's started, and sometimes it starts firing on its own.
Instead, intelligence agencies irresponsibly hold onto them. And so they get leaked at best, or at worst end up in the wrong hands.
As bug fixes are reverse engineered, in your example, the malware could be created just as it was, and the patches had been out for months and the affected machines had not been patched, so again -- what difference would it have made?
1. Analyze the update, determining what parts of the system it changes
2. Analyze how the system behaved before the update (i.e. find the vulnerability)
3. Find suitable parameters for the vulnerability to reliably work
4. Build a proof of concept exploit
5. Integrate it into your ransomware
Getting a working proof of concept from a leak saves you 4 out of 5 steps. If you are a financially motivated cyber criminal (and if you are distributing ransomware, you are), that can mean the difference between a waste of your time and a juicy return on investment.I'm not arguing against the development on Metasploit though, and neither do I want to make an argument against vulnerability research. Every time Tavis Ormandy takes a shower, an AV vendor runs for cover; and on Christmas each year, Karsten Nohl cancels the vacations for some legacy system developers. That's a good thing, because those guys report their findings. They push vendors to fix the vulnerabilities, and they improve the security of systems we all depend on, every day.
Governments should do the same thing. I am all in favor of investing more in vulnerability research, but we need a process of disclosure. Stockpiling vulnerabilities puts everyone at risk, with little benefits.
Circling back to Metasploit: Yes, it makes work easier for cybercriminals. But even just the knowledge that a vulnerability will be available as a module quickly may be enough to make some vendors think twice about not reacting to a disclosure email, whether it's from Project Zero, independent researchers, or (hopefully more often) government CERTs.
So are you arguing people going to discover these independently anyway, or not? Pick one and stick with it. You can't have it both ways...
Normally full disclosure happens after about 45 days (I'm not an expert, I don't know exactly) but in special cases the time is extended.
This would probably be considered as a special case as Microsoft exceptionally released updates to unsupported, old versions of Windows and the hole itself was critical.
Please note that WannaCry hit in mid May - not that long time ago.
Shadow Brokers Group public disclosure of stolen tools from NSA happened in April.
There would have been even less time if this was indeed a security researcher using a 30-45 day time period.
Nope! We know it's more complicated than that. But we think the NSA strikes the wrong balance between offense and defense. If you want to understand where people are coming from a little more you could start with some of Bruce Schneier's articles:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/the_nsa_is_ho...
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/06/wannacry_and_...
... where, for example, Schneier proposes that NSA should keep vulnerabilities for no more than six months, based on how far ahead of adversaries it doesn't appear to be.
The general point Schneier tends to make is: we are a huge fat defensive target with limited offensive targets. Vulnerabilities hurt you in proportion to how much infrastructure you run; we run a lot. Sitting on a vuln so you can use it a dozen times, while powering your society with billions of machines that have the same vuln, is a bad tradeoff.
Not remotely the same thing. The Army hoards guns in case we enter a war and need them. The NSA hoards vulnerabilities so they can spend more time using them on our allies, fellow citizens, anf our enemies.
It would be nice to see HN do some A/B testing. Divide viewers randomly into two bins: those who see posts in FIFO, vs those who see posts LIFO; see if there is correlation between which comments are upvoted.
Also, it may be that contentious comments push a thread comment rate up, more partisan opinions cause article upvoting too, collectively pushing the article up in rankings. Less emotive topics/replies let an article slide down into the bitbucket.
Unfortunately, for all 3 letter agencies of the world, the analogy may not be far fetched.
"Army is planning to grant exclusive rights to this potentially groundbreaking medicine–along with as much as $173 million in funding from the Department of Health and Human Services—to the French pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi Pasteur. "
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-government-created-thi...
The key difference is that we can't make the enemies guns ineffective by accumulating even more guns. The NSA could weaken the enemy's vulnerability stockpile by aggressively chasing and releasing vulnerability information to vendors.
Personally I think most defences are rubbish, it is MAD, and the financial implications would be dire.
It reminds me of a classic line from Spies Like Us: "A weapon unused is a useless weapon."
#Except against dissidents.