Tag Archives: crisis team

Shadow Brokers Response Team

Published / by jeff / Leave a Comment

https://steemit.com/shadowbrokers/@theshadowbrokers/theshadowbrokers-monthly-dump-service-june-2017

 

Q: What is going to be in the next dump?

TheShadowBrokers is not deciding yet. Something of value to someone. See theshadowbrokers’ previous posts. The time for “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours first” is being over. Peoples is seeing what happenings when theshadowbrokers is showing theshadowbrokers’ first. This is being wrong question. Question to be asking “Can my organization afford not to be first to get access to theshadowbrokers dumps?”

 

So the Shadowbrokers will be releasing more allegedly NSA tools this coming month, as referenced in this story – http://bgr.com/2017/05/30/shadow-brokers-nsa-exploits-subscription/.

They are asking for Zcash to be used to purchase access to these latest exploits, which is around the $20k or so.  Now based on what happened in early May with Wannacry and the impact we saw in the UK, this is a concern for us all.  It did not take long from the initial release for someone to take advantage of these tools and weaponize them that had a large scale impact.  The positive side of this, is that now I believe many companies have had a wake up call and have learnt some lessons with regards to patching their systems and paying attention to when the security guy’s tell them to keep software and operating systems updated.

So now we have a couple of weeks until more tools are going to be released, I’m a bit indifferent if I agree with the current thinking of paying to get access to these tools.  This is a sound idea.  Get access to the exploits, research and work with vendors for them to be fixed, that is very commendable.  However it does open up a whole host of ethics and are we essentially going to be held to ransom everytime this happens in the future?  I’m not quite sure if this is the right approach.  With that said, there is the link below to the patreon page, that has more information and you can donate to the cause if you wish.

https://www.patreon.com/shadowbrokers_crisis_team

 

The group calling itself the Shadow Brokers have released several caches of exploits to date. These caches and releases have had a detrimental outcome on the Internet at large, one leak especially resulted in the now in-famous WannaCry ransomware worm – others have been used by criminal crackers to illegally access infrastructure. Many have been analysing the data to determine its authenticity and impact on infrastructure, as a community it has been expressed that the harm caused by exploits could have been mitigated against had the Shadow Brokers been paid for their disclosures.

 

This is an interesting read, that alludes to that the NSA did inform microsoft once the EnternalBlue software was stolen from the NSA.

 

The consequences of the NSA’s decision to keep the flaw secret, combined with its failure to keep the tool secure, became clear Friday when reports began spreading of a massive cyberattack in which the WannaCry software encrypted data on hundreds of thousands of computers and demanded a ransom to decrypt it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/nsa-officials-worried-about-the-day-its-potent-hacking-tool-would-get-loose-then-it-did/2017/05/16/50670b16-3978-11e7-a058-ddbb23c75d82_story.html?utm_term=.762b4cedfb72