Hacker News Reader

Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

> I'm unclear on why I'm meant to take this particular Windows SMB exploit so seriously

the way I understand it, most of the affected, including the paper, take it seriously because it's their "tax money at work."

I understand also that somebody at the receiving end of the said money is not satisfied that that topic is raised.

View on HN

The tax money was spent enabling the NSA to hack into foreign computers, which is the SIGINT directorate's whole job. It sucks that their favorite bug got burned! It is a problem that it leaked, and developing a new pet bug ahead of schedule is an inefficient use of tax dollars. But NSA didn't make this bug, and it's not even unlikely that other people had it before it leaked, just in a different exploit package. Now that there's a reliable exploit attributable to NSA, everyone is going to use that one regardless.

Are you checzh or polish er just need to know. I am fan of both.

I'm from the south side of Chicago.

> But NSA didn't make this bug

We don't know that.

So, you think ETERNALBLUE was an inside job?

Always worth considering.

Intelligence agencies put people everywhere.

Memory unsafe languages are already the perfect generator of exploitable bugs with how easy they are to make exploitable mistakes in. Few exploits need more explanation than that. (It would be interesting if the popularity of memory unsafe languages like C/C++ was somehow encouraged by the NSA to keep the world exploitable, but I've never heard of any evidence of that.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com